The current score of Israel’s “right to defend itself:” Over 1,800 dead Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, and 10,000 more wounded. Israel’s loss: slightly over 60 killed, all soldiers except for 3. The world condemns Israel’s actions, but as usual, it’s backer, enabler and partner in international crimes, the United States government, continues it’s sole support of it’s favorite client state. All under the false claim of “self defense.”
President Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, is the fourth consecutive U.S. president to bomb the country of Iraq. But, he assures us, the U.S. cannot sit by and allow the potential slaughter and starvation of 40,000 refugees in the mountains near Kurdistan, when we have the “unique” capability to do something about it, such as “humanitarian” air drops of food and water from our air force; and of course, along side this noble concern for innocent civilians that our leaders love to profess as a pretext for war, we will be bombing the militant group that is taking over large swaths of Iraq, I.S.I.S.
For the casual observer in America, nothing sounds unreasonable about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” which is generally understood to be a universal norm – everyone has a right of self-defense. Also, who would be against our superior air force dropping food and water to 40,000 refugees stranded in the mountains? And if we have to bomb some radicals who have invaded the country of Iraq that we and our coalition of lapdogs (mostly Britain) broke in the first place, Mr. Obama assures us that we are not going back into war with Iraq, and there will be no U.S. ground troops.
Looking underneath the official rhetoric and propaganda of U.S. officials, and it’s defender of the false narrative of our nobility towards innocents, the mainstream press – facts quickly arise that should leave no doubt that the U.S. government, regardless of what president is in power, does not care in the least about the suffering and murder of millions of innocent civilians world wide, unless they can be used as an excuse for war. Let’s consider just a few examples of many, starting in Iraq and Iran.
In 1953 the CIA orchestrated a coup to overthrow the parliamentary government of Iran and replaced it with one of the world’s most notorious dictators (there are a few more though, also supported by the U.S.) the Shah. Until 1979. the Shah acted as a puppet of the United States, allowing us and other western companies to go in and exploit Iran’s oil. Prior to the Shaw, the people of Iran’s government had the audacity of nationalizing their countries oil supply, instead of realizing they were all just living on top of our oil. The Shaw tortured and murdered thousands of Iranian citizens, keeping them in line to serve their true purpose, the enrichment of Western powers. This eventually led to the 1979 Iranian revolution when the Shaw was finally overthrown. And since then, Iran has been considered and treated like one of the United State’s and Israel’s worst enemies, and presented as a danger to the world.
After the Shaw was overthrown and the U.S. kicked out of Iran, the U.S. government moved quickly to support another murderous tyrant, Saddam Hussein. The U.S. officials were aware of course of Saddam’s crimes and cruelty towards his own people, and supported him with money and military supplies. The U.S. became his backer against his bloody eight year war with Iran. The incident of the Butcher of Baghdad using chemical warfare to “gas his own people” the Kurds, was condemned by most of the world and the United Nations at the time, but U.S. officials in Washington made sure that no punitive action was taken against him. Afterall, we gave him those chemical weapons to kill Iranians with, so whats a few dead innocent men women and children in northern Iraq? It was something to be swept under the rug, and only condemned years later by U.S. officials as a pretext to overthrow Saddam and invade Iraq when he fell out of favor with Washington. Then the narrative became “he gassed his own people.” He’s a murderer, a torturer, our leaders couldn’t say enough bad things about him. And it is true that he was a torturer and murderer and cruel tyrant, but it is also true that the same U.S. leaders knew this to be the case all along when he was a tyrant serving our needs. He only officially became evil when Washington could no longer control him. Morality never played a part in U.S. treatment of him.
Concern for the citizens of Iraq was also not deemed morally important by the Clinton administration, when it forced sanctions on Iraq that are known to have killed over half a million Iraqi children. When Madeline Albright, U.N. ambassador at the time who later became Secretary of State, was asked about the half million plus children of Iraq that were killed by Clinton’s U.S. sanctions, she said said it was worth the price. Here is a Youtube link of her statements in the interview, in which she declared that half a million innocent children killed through U.S. sanctions was worth the price of punishing Saddam, copy and paste in your browser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4PgpbQfxgo
The number of civilians killed in Iraq since George W. Bush and his cowboys invaded it under the lies of “weapons of mass destruction” is hard to come by, but numerous studies point to total deaths from this most recent war in Iraq between 150 thousand and 400 thousand, and 1.3 million refugees from this country of 30 million, fleeing the liberating effects of the U.S.’s invasion, which was later revised as “promoting democracy” when no weapons of mass destruction were found. There are also studies showing there are now 4.5 million orphans in Iraq, with 600 thousand of them homeless. The following is a link to the respected MIT’s website, which offers a more complete picture of the human tragedy caused in Iraq by U.S. led wars, figures not often reported in the mainstream U.S. press and dialogue, and offers a sobering amount of evidence to debunk President Obama’s proclamation of the U.S. government’s concern for civilians. I strongly recommend you take a look at the statitistics on this site if you are interested in a true picture of the cost of war on the people we waged it against:
http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/
It is also worth noting, though it is not often noted by American political pundits on the Propaganda News Channels, that the United States and it’s Arab allies along with England and a few Western culprits, have been supporting the arming of the Islamic extremists that have now blossomed and evolved into our current Frankenstein’s monster in Iraq, ISIS, for over two years in the “civil war” in Syria for the purpose of overthrowing Syria’s leader Assad, to be replaced by presumably, someone more agreeable with our interests there. There have been well over 100 thousand civilians killed in this conflict, and over a million refugees fleeing the country’s war. I haven’t heard about any air-lifts of supplies to these refugees, or much concern expressed about their well being; however, you may recall last year that Obama almost bombed Syria because of our love of Syria’s innocents who were killed in chemical attacks in the ongoing conflict. One positive result of this, however, was Assad’s agreement to hand over his chemical weapons for destruction, and this has largely been carried out. Other nations in the region still maintain their illegal chemical weapons, such as Israel.
Watching Obama’s first announcements the other night about our new “humanitarian” effort and bombing in Iraq, was like watching a soundbite of his announcement of our bombing and participation of the overthrow of Gaddafi of Libya in 2011. His words sounded almost exactly like I remember his words describing our motives for helping our allies Britain and France bomb them into a new government. It was because if we din’t, our conscience would have be bothered by the slaughter of civilians in Libya that would result from our lack of inaction. We are just trying to help out and be the good guy.
And speaking of our concern for the slaughter of civilians in the Gaza strip by the U.S. fed war machine of Israel, well, “Israel has a right to defend herself.” Apparently though, the Palestinians, who have for over 30 year been illegally occupied, murdered, tortured, and starved of both food and water supplies on an ongoing basis by the Israelis, with U.S. backing in direct monetary and military aid. The U.S. has of course for years claimed to want a peaceful solution, a solution for which there is an international consensus that involves a two state solution of Israel and Palestine, with Israel withdrawing its illegally occupied Palestinian territory to the 1967 borders, with some minor adjustments. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and brutal oppression of it’s people is recognized by almost the entire world and United Nations body to be illegal and immoral, but that means little when the world’s one super power continues to obstruct the peace process, even as it pretends in public to be a fair and concerned broker.
Hamas, whom the U.S. government, U.S. press, and Israel often refer to as terrorists, was democratically elected by the Palestinian people in 2007 over the U.S. and Israel’s preferred candidates of the Palestinian Authority. Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s leading intellectuals, and expert and critic on U.S. foreign policy, characterises the blockade on Gaza that resulted after this election as the U.S. and Israel’s punishment of the Palestinian people for voting the wrong way. For the past 7 years, the people living in Gaza have been in a virtual land prison, blocked in by an ocean blockade, and land blockade by Israel and Egypt. The details and human cost of this blockade are well documented, and today even the king of Propaganda News, Fox, actually posted a story about the blockade in Gaza which is worth reading, especially by conservative readers suspicious of the “liberal” media. The article does distort some of what prompted the blockade, by citing Hamas’s “violent takeover” of Gaza in 2007, which was actually the result of a mini-civil war among the Palestinians, stoked covertly by the United States after Hamas won in a free and fair election, the results of which were unacceptable to the U.S. and Israel.
Since Fox rarely reports facts it doesn’t like, this article is worth reading. Here is that link:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/11/7-year-old-border-blockade-imposed-to-isolate-hamas-has-hurt-gaza-18-million/
As in most of these exercises in self defense, Israel always manages to bomb hospitals and schools sheltering civilians from the violence, with the occasion member of the press killed as well, but always called an “accident” by Israel, and then blamed on Hamas for using “human shields.” It is amazing with all of Israel’s high tech weaponry and “surgical” strikes. that they continue to mistake United Nations schools in Gaza as shields for Hamas, the people’s choice of representation against the decades long occupation and siege.
Of course, there is the usual rhetoric from the propaganda peanut gallery that any criticism of U.S. foreign policy is committed by haters of freedom and un-patriotic Americans, and that any criticism of Israeli crimes are anti-semitic. But any reasonable person, looking at the evidence with objective eyes, will most likely not approve of the U.S. support for brutal dictators worldwide, and it’s support of Israel’s abuse of Palestinians. These charges are meant to tarnish the critics and quell debate instead of addressing the issues, just as weapons of mass destruction and the humanitarian efforts of bombing the enemy are meant to rally the blind to continue their support through taxes and volunteer citizens of it’s military.
The rest of the world is well aware the U.S.’s one sided support for Israel’s atrocities, but it appears that more Americans are paying attention to the current crisis, as images and videos of bloody children and urban destruction on an apocalyptic scale are making it’s way into their consciousness. If the American people begin to recognize the scale of suffering and violence being brought upon the people of Gaza, our government might see a reason to be more assertive than it has been in forcing a peace deal between Israel and Palestine with a two state solution. But as of now, Israel continues to illegally settle new areas of Palestinian territories, and further carve up the Palestinian territory with it’s “security wall” that is further eroding the possibility of a two state solution, cutting off and isolating large Palestinian populations from each other. I do believe that Americans in general are good people at heart and that if they become fully aware of it’s government’s near unflinching support of warmongering Israeli policies, it will demand change. But that’s audacious hope, I do realize.