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British RAF servicing Saudi jets bombing civilians in Yemen – UK armed forces minister

RT | March 18, 2019

Britain is providing “engineering support” for UK-supplied aircraft operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force, responsible for killing innocent people in Yemen, a British government minister has revealed.

Armed Forces Minister Mark Lancaster was responding to a question in parliament from Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, on military personnel seconded to BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia, when he admitted that the RAF have provided engineering and “generic training” to the Saudi Air Force involved in the bombing of Yemen.

“RAF personnel on secondment to BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia have provided routine engineering support for UK-supplied aircraft operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), including aircraft engaged in military operations in Yemen.”

Lancaster insisted UK personnel were not involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties, in response to Russell-Moyle’s claim that the “British support keeps Saudi’s air war going.”

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against the Arms Trade has branded the revelation “shocking but not surprising,” arguing that UK military personnel “should not be servicing Saudi jets or supporting the Saudi armed forces.”

It’s not just the UK that has been widely criticised for being party to the Saudi-led coalition’s bombardment of Yemen.

In December, the US Pentagon revealed that they were having to claw back $331 million of taxpayer-subsidized money gifted to Saudi Arabia and the UAE over a three-year period, when it ‘accidentally’ refueled their aircraft for free during their war on Yemen.

In November, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry accused the UK government of having “blood on its hands” after admitting that the RAF had trained over a hundred Saudi pilots in the past ten years.

Coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have relentlessly bombed Yemen since 2015 in an effort to oust the Houthi rebels controlling the capital city of Sanaa.

They have reportedly targeted hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, leading to a massive cholera outbreak, and upwards of 60,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict since 2016 – with a further 85,000 estimated dead from famine and malnutrition.

Half of Yemen’s population relies on food aid to survive, placing them in immediate danger of starving to death after coalition forces blockaded the port city of Hodeidah last year.

March 18, 2019 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

‘A crime against humanity’: Rouhani says Iran will file legal case against US over sanctions

RT | March 18, 2019

President Hassan Rouhani announced that Tehran will pursue legal action against US officials who imposed sanctions on Iran, adding that the dispute could be brought before an international court.

The Iranian president said that he had ordered the ministries of foreign affairs and justice to “file a legal case in Iranian courts against those in America who designed and imposed sanctions on Iran.”

Describing the unilaterally imposed sanctions as a “crime against humanity,” Rouhani said that if Iranian courts believe there is a strong case against Washington, Tehran would then pursue the legal challenge in international courts of justice. He said that the United States is seeking to “come back to Iran and rule the nation again.”

While dragging US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before an Iranian court may be far-fetched, Tehran has had past success arguing against US sanctions on the international stage. In October, the International Court Of Justice (ICJ) ordered the United States to ensure that its sanctions do not target humanitarian aid or civil aviation safety.

Washington re-imposed sanctions on Tehran after US President Donald Trump decided in May to abandon the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran. Trump’s decision to back out of the deal – which was negotiated with five other world powers – has strained relations between Washington and its European allies, who are now looking to bypass the US-imposed sanctions.

In February, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that despite the US withdrawal from the 2015 accord, Iran was still in full compliance with its commitments towards non-proliferation.

Iran has scoffed at Washington’s stated aim of reducing the country’s oil exports to “zero,” and has repeatedly warned that it is prepared to take military action to protect its oil tankers from US interference.

March 18, 2019 Posted by | War Crimes | , | 2 Comments

Attempt to prosecute Assad at ICC is aimed at undermining Syrian peace process

Historian John Laughland explains why the International Criminal Court’s attempt to indict President Assad of Syria reveals its dictatorial and warmongering tendencies.

RT | March 18, 2019

The announcement that “a group of Syrian refugees and their London lawyers” have found “a neat legal trick” to press for an indictment against Syrian President Bashar Assad by the International Criminal Court demonstrates, yet again, the dangerous corruption of international justice, against which I have been warning for over a decade.

The Syrian war is nearly over, thanks to the military successes of the Syrian army and its Russian and Iranian allies. Exhaustion on both sides has probably helped. Diplomatic overtures have started to re-integrate Syria into the international system, starting at the regional level: the United Arab Emirates have re-opened their embassy in Damascus; the Sudanese president, Assad’s near namesake, Omar Al-Bashir, has visited Syria, as have senior Egyptian officials; Syrian officials have attended pan-Arab summits; even Israel is maintaining its dialogue with Russia over Syria. In short, the situation is being slowly normalised as Syria herself embarks on the painful search for internal peace.

The attempt to get Assad prosecuted is an attempt to stamp out these seedlings of peace before they take root. Any prosecution against Assad would scupper, or at least severely damage, this slow acceptance that the Syrian president is part of the solution. When even the British government has accepted that Assad is here to stay, and that peace must be made with him, his implacable enemies fear that their prize is about to slip out of their grasp. They do not want peace, if that means keeping Assad.

We know that the goal is to sabotage any peace process because this kind of indictment is old hat in international criminal law. At the end of the Bosnian Civil War in 1995, indictments were issued against the Bosnian Serb leaders, especially Radovan Karadzic, specifically in order to remove them from the Dayton peace talks. Antonio Cassese, then president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said in 1995, just after the indictment was issued against Karadzic, that it had been issued for that reason: “The indictment means that these gentlemen will not be able to participate in peace negotiations” (quoted in the Italian daily L’Unità, 26 July 1995). Incidentally, Cassese had himself encouraged the prosecutor to bring these prosecutions even though he, as a judge and president of the tribunal, was supposed to be neutral.

The “legal trick” is designed to overcome the fact that Syria is not a state party to the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. Assad’s enemies are seeking to sidestep the fact that Syria is beyond the ICC’s reach by seeking to apply to Syria a principle which, unfortunately, the ICC itself applied to Burma last year. In September, the ICC judges agreed that a case could be brought against Myanmar (Burma), even though that country is not a state party to the Rome statute, because the crimes it had allegedly committed – deportation – had caused people to flee into Bangladesh, which is a state party. By analogy, Syria’s enemies hope that the presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan, a state party to the ICC statute, will enable them to go after Assad. They seem not to care that this is the first time anyone has ever mentioned “deportation” in Syria, although Damascus has been accused of all manner of other crimes.

The ruling on Myanmar and Bangladesh illustrates everything that is wrong with international justice. Not only did the decision to apply jurisdiction to the Burmese authorities break the fundamental principles of international law, as expressed in the “treaty on treaties,” the 1969 Vienna Convention, which says that the principle of free consent is “universally recognized” and whose Article 34 says, “A treaty does not create either obligations or rights for a third state without its consent,” it also broke an even more fundamental principle by specifically claiming the right to define its own powers (referred to, in English texts, with the French and German expressions la compétence de la compétence and Kompetenz-Kompetenz). The Court described this as “a well-established principle of international law according to which any international tribunal has the power to determine the extent of its own jurisdiction.” In reality, it is no such thing.

On the contrary, the powers of all organisations are determined by law. Even sovereign governments are restricted by national laws in their powers. The idea that an international organisation has the legal right to determine its own powers, and to extend its jurisdiction to states that have not accepted it, is about as blatant a violation of the rule of law as one can imagine. In the past, such claims were equivalent to declarations of war, because a claim like this can only be settled by force. For example, on July 23 1914, Austria demanded the right for its police to carry out investigations inside Serbia for the assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 29. It sent an ultimatum to Belgrade to this effect, which Serbia refused. The result was the First World War, launched by Vienna in the name of the right to punish the perpetrators of that crime.

The ICC has already discredited itself massively after the Laurent Gbagbo fiasco. Having collaborated in the politically-motivated indictment of the president of Côte d’Ivoire in 2011 – a collaboration which gave legitimacy to the French military operation to oust him, just as it gave legitimacy to the NATO attack on Libya by also indicting Colonel Gaddafi at the same time – the Court was forced to acquit Laurent Gbagbo eight years later, in January of this year.

By seeking to extend its lamentable rule to Syria, and thereby to disrupt a barely embryonic peace there, the ICC risks destroying its reputation even further. For the rules limiting the jurisdiction of international organisations to states which have consented to accept them are not some arcane technicality of international law. Instead, they reflect the most basic principle of politics, which is that those who wield power need to be constitutionally linked to those over whom they wield it. International organisations which are not based on such consent violate that very basic principle flagrantly, and therefore start to resemble the very dictatorships they pretend to combat.

John Laughland, who has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and who has taught at universities in Paris and Rome, is a historian and specialist in international affairs.

Read more:

‘Mask is off’: US shifts to open coercion & manipulation against ICC, analysts tell RT

March 18, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 1 Comment

The Zionists’ Fight Extends Beyond Palestine

By Miko Peled | Mint Press News | March 14, 2019

The Zionists’ suppression of freedoms extends beyond Palestine, particularly when it comes to freedom of speech about Israel. Zionist agents, planted in centers of power around the world, are busy silencing those who would criticize Israel. Using an array of highly effective methods, they have been successful at getting laws passed by legislators, getting major political figures falsely accused of making anti-Semitic statements, and establishing a new, Zionist-manufactured definition of what it means to be anti-Semitic.

Earlier this year the United States Senate passed Resolution S-1 that gives the federal government the right to penalize anyone calling to boycott Israel. Then — being a black, Muslim woman who dared to challenge the patriarchy, white supremacy, and Zionism and thus alienate the Washington establishment — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was targeted and accused of anti-Semitism.

As I had reported in 2017 and again in 2018, this disturbing political witch hunt is not limited to the U.S. In the U.K., members of the Labor Party, including the leader Jeremy Corbyn, have been under attack for several years, with the latest targets being MP Chris Williamson of the U.K. Labour Party and journalist Asa Winstanley. They are latest of a long list of members of the party who have been suspended from the party because of bogus accusations of anti-Semitism.

A campaign to bring down Corbyn

Israel is terrified of a Corbyn government in the U.K. and we can expect that it will stop at nothing in order to bring him down. The campaign to undermine him includes the office of the Israeli prime minister. This was made evident in August of 2018 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that Corbyn receive “unequivocal condemnation” for attending “a memorial service for the Munich massacre terrorists.” Corbyn attended no such memorial, as I was able to demonstrate in a piece published by MintPress News at the time.

The Zionist fear of Corbyn is a result of his lifelong commitment to justice and his unwavering support for all oppressed people, including the Palestinians. He has said on more than one occasion, and as recently as this month, that the U.K. must freeze its arms sales to Israel. However, attacks aimed directly at Corbyn are not enough to get the job done. Israel and its agents around the U.K. have been engaged in a campaign of lies and smears, the results of which are shown in this report that was put out by the Labour Party and published by the BBC.

The report points out, among other things:

  • 673 complaints of anti-Semitism by Labour Party members were received — a Labour spokesman said this represented about 0.1 percent of the membership;
  • 96 members were immediately suspended after complaints were made, and a further 211 were told they would be investigated;
  • 146 members received a first warning, and 220 cases did not have sufficient evidence of a breach of party rules for an investigation;
  • Of the 307 who were suspended or notified of an investigation, 44 members left the party.

These are complaints that pertain to members of the party. An additional 433 complaints were received by the party that were not about Labour Party members. Clearly, the campaign by the pro-Israel groups aims to overwhelm the Labour Party into submission and bring about the fall of Corbyn by using a barrage of anti-Semitism accusations.

Jeremy Corbyn is a man who has stood against racism and injustice his entire career. His leadership has energized the party, which has gained more than half a million new members over that span. However, one has to wonder if there is an argument being made somewhere that Corbyn is the reason for this sudden outbreak of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Again, one can only guess that the Zionist goal is to bring the Labour Party to exhaustion, and to the conclusion that Corbyn is too much trouble for his worth and thus must be replaced for the good of the party.

Chris Williamson

Slated to be Corbyn’s number-two man, at least in the minds of Corbyn supporters, Williamson is no less principled and no less a fighter than Corbyn himself. He is charismatic and he and Corbyn could make a powerful progressive leadership team, which is why he had to be taken down.

The hope, one assumes, on the pro-Israel flank of the Labour Party is that Corbyn’s current deputy, Tom Watson — who is an avid Zionist and not at all a Corbyn supporter — will take over once Corbyn steps down, or rather, once Corbyn is taken down by Zionist agencies working for Israel. Watson, for his part, is already rallying supporters behind him in a new group he formed within the Labour Party, called “Future Britain.”

Williamson, like Corbyn, is dedicated to the idea of democratizing the Labour Party, which means taking control from the party establishment and giving it to the members. Combine that with his pro-Palestine views and he is the perfect target for an anti-Semitism smear.

Asa Winstanley

According to a report in the Electronic Intifada, a publication for which Asa Winstanley writes, the Labour Party has initiated disciplinary proceedings against Winstanley, who is also a member of the party. This was first published by a journalist from the Jewish Chronicle — which is a Zionist, anti-Palestinian publication. Winstanley is a journalist whose views on Palestine are clear, uncompromising and precise [he insisted on shunning Gilad Atzmon as ‘antisemitic’]. No doubt he was placed on the list of members to be smeared and suspended because of his honest writing on Palestine.

Zionist oppression and brutal tactics against the people of Palestine, and the attempts to silence their supporters around the world, are not going to end on their own. People of conscience must stand for Palestine; people whose right to free speech is being denied must stand up and stand together; steps must be taken to end the dominant influence and automatic legitimacy that Zionism and its agents enjoy around the world.

March 18, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 5 Comments

Bolton blasts Turkey for maintaining ‘very bad’ relations with Israel

Press TV – March 18, 2019

US National Security Adviser John Bolton has not ruled out that Turkey is a “foe” of the United States, blasting Ankara for maintaining a “very bad” relationship with Washington’s close ally Israel.

When asked by AM 970 radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday whether Turkey was a “friend or foe” to the US, Bolton refused to give a straight answer and instead cited several major stumbling blocks in ties.

“Well you know they’re still a NATO ally; we’re trying to work with them, but they’ve got a very bad relationship with our close friends in Israel. That’s something we need to look out on,” Bolton said.

A war of words began between Turkey and Israel recently, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau said the occupied territories only belong to the Jewish people and not all citizens.

Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin strongly condemned Netanyahu’s “blatant racism and discrimination.”

In response, the Israeli premier called Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator” who jails journalists and judges.

Erdogan, however, called Netanyahu a “thief” and a “tyrant who massacred seven-year-old Palestinian children.”

The war of words continued Friday when the Turkish president rebuked Netanyahu’s son for suggesting the city of Istanbul was under “Turkish occupation”.

“You occupied the whole of Palestine!” Erdogan fired back at Netanyahu’s son, saying it is actually the Tel Aviv regime which has occupied the entire Palestinian land.

Elsewhere in his Sunday comments Bolton said that disagreements “with respect to the conflict in Syria” were another issue affecting bilateral ties between the US and Turkey.

He said US President Donald Trump “would like to have a good relationship with Turkey; he’d like to see US trade with Turkey increase, but we need them to help us out in some of these other problems in Syria and elsewhere in the region.”

US support for YPG militants, whom Ankara views as terrorists and their group an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has angered Turkey.

The US has been arming and training Kurdish militants under the banner of helping them fight Daesh, but Syria and several other countries see ulterior motives behind the deployment.

President Trump’s decision last year to leave Syria has exposed the Kurdish group to possible Turkish attacks.

Fears of a Turkish assault have led the Kurds to strike an agreement with the Syrian government to leave Manbij in exchange for military support in case they come under attack from Turkey.

Turkey, a key US ally in the region, has repeatedly questioned Washington’s deployment of heavy weapons in Syria despite the defeat of Daesh in much of the Arab country.

Bolton slams Turkey over S-400 deal

In his talks to AM 970 radio, Bolton further blasted Turkey for refusing to abandon a deal to purchase S-400 air defense missile systems from Russia, a major obstacle to US-Turkish relations.

“We’re concerned about their purchase of the Russian air defense system called the S-400 – that’s a big problem,” Bolton said.

The United States has warned Turkey of “grave consequences” if Ankara goes ahead with the plan to purchase Russian S-400 missile systems.

Moscow and Ankara finalized an agreement on the delivery of the S-400 missile systems in December 2017.

Last April, Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said in Ankara that they had agreed to expedite the delivery which could be made between late 2019 and early 2020.

Washington has reportedly proposed to deliver one US-made Patriot missile battery by the end of 2019, on the condition that Ankara abandons the deal with Moscow.

The S-400 is an advanced Russian missile system designed to detect, track, and destroy planes, drones, or missiles as far as 402 kilometers away. It has previously been sold only to China and India.

Turkey is striving to boost its air defense, particularly after Washington decided in 2015 to withdraw its Patriot surface-to-air missile system from Turkey’s border with Syria, a move that weakened Turkey’s air defense.

March 18, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Israel military censor banned, partially redacted more than 3,000 news items in 2018

MEMO | March 18, 2019

Israel’s military censor “prohibited the publication of 363 news articles in 2018” in addition to “partially or fully redacting a total of 2,712 news items submitted to it for prior review”, reported +972 Magazine, a significant spike in “censor intervention”.

According to the news site, “the censor barred more news stories from publication in 2018 than in almost any other year this decade”. With respect to articles published after partial redaction, only 2014 saw “similarly substantial censorship of the press”.

+972 Magazine reported that “the spike in censorship compared to 2017 is significant: in the last year, the IDF Censor prevented the publication of 92 more articles than it did in the year prior, while it partially or fully redacted an additional 625 stories.”

Overall, “over the past eight years, the censor has prohibited a total of 2,661 news stories from seeing the light of day,” the article added.

As +972 Magazine explained, “all media outlets in Israel are required to submit articles relating to security and foreign relations to the IDF Censor for review prior to publication.”

Israel is unique in the so-called “democratic world” in compelling journalists and publications to “submit their reporting for review prior to publication”, and the only country “where that censorship can be criminally enforced”.

In addition, “the Israeli military censor’s powers extend beyond news outlets to include authority to review before publication and censor books and items in the State Archives.”

March 18, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment