I have mentioned previously that the introduction of all the latest and greatest western weapons in the inventory given to the Ukraine would have some very deleterious effects in the future. One was permitting possible future antagonists to observe and and take detailed notes on the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) and experiment with prospective or actual countermeasures to neutralize or destroy these weapons systems and platforms. The other concerns would be allowing the first near-peer/peer martial contest to use this to shape and refine future strategic objectives. The Russians are certainly doing their homework and actively modifying and improving their means of waging war.
Performance is predictably abysmal for so many of these Western systems. The corporate/access media seems to finally be catching on that the weapons programs are not very effective.
The Biden administration has committed more than $50 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a Pentagon fact sheet. U.S. assistance has proven vital in helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s advances and mount counteroffensives, but some of the weapons have failed to have the desired impact as Russia’s military has adapted, according to media reports and experts.
If only the diversity enthusiasm incentivized opposing viewpoints and genuine intellectual differences.
Future historians will have a tremendous cottage industry trying to tease out how the world’s most expensive military paper tiger not only convinced the bill-payers to keep funding these disasters but the cognitive strategic deficit disorder that informed the entire fallacious enterprise managed to spend tens of trillions of dollars for a non-nuclear military apparatus that had a picture perfect track record of consistent failure since 1945.
MOSCOW – Andrei Belousov, the candidate for the post of Russian defense minister, and newly-appointed Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu will participate in the informal meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov told reporters on Tuesday.
The informal Putin-Xi meeting will take place on May 16 during the Russian leader’s visit to China. Other members of Russian government, including acting Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and acting Finance Minister Anton Siluanov will participate in the meeting.
“We invited, naturally, the new defense minister, Belousov, to participate in this program, who, together with Lavrov and me, will participate in this meeting on the evening of May 16 that will be held in the very narrow format. Also, in continuation of our contacts with Chinese colleagues, we included Security Council Secretary Shoigu in the delegation — he should be a part of 1+4 [meeting],” Ushakov said.
“Most likely, the main and most important issues of foreign policy cooperation will be discussed during the informal meeting of leaders, which will take place at the end of the first day of work,” the official shared.
The mutual visits of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping confirm the priorities of bilateral relations, the aide noted.
“This tradition is a clear confirmation of the high level of bilateral relations, the priority attention paid by both sides to the Russian-Chinese partnership. And this certainly also reflects the relations that have developed between the two leaders of our states,” he told reporters.
The cooperation between Russia and China is developing in all areas, and this partnership is a paragon of interstate relations, Ushakov emphasized.
“Today, cooperation is steadily developing in all areas, and as our leaders have repeatedly stressed, and, above all, [Chinese] President Xi, this partnership is a paragon of interstate relations in the 21st century,” he said.
The partnership between Moscow and Beijing also demonstrates resistance to any external pressure and is one of the stabilizing factors in international affairs in general, the official added.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang to visit Russia this summer
The Kremlin aide also mentioned that Moscow and Beijing are cooperating in high-tech industries as well, including in creating a lunar station and drafting projects related to nuclear power plants.
“I have already mentioned that our governments [Russia and China] actively cooperate, the main thing is that the governments meet regularly. The visit of the head of the Chinese government is already scheduled for this summer,” Ushakov said.
“We note Beijing’s balanced position on the Ukrainian crisis, Beijing understands the true causes of its occurrence,” he noted.
China also emphasizes that without Russia it is counterproductive to discuss anything in the context of the Ukrainian crisis, the official added.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will discuss international cooperation, including within the UN and BRICS.
“There will be an in-depth exchange of views on cooperation in various international organizations and structures, including the UN, where Russia and China stand in solidarity on almost all topics of the UN agenda. Naturally, cooperation between the two countries within the framework of BRICS will also be touched upon,” Ushakov told reporters.
The Chinese side has given a preliminary agreement to come to the BRICS summit in Russia’s Kazan, the official added.
According to Ushakov, during Putin’s visit to Harbin (China), the Russian president will be accompanied by Chinese Vice President Han Zheng.
Newly appointed members of the Russian government will accompany President Vladimir Putin during his visit to China and participate in the negotiations.
“Then an expanded composition with the participation of representative delegations of the two parties, including members of the Russian government in an updated composition and their counterparts from the State Council of the People’s Republic of China [will meet],” he pointed out.
Russian deputy prime ministers, including First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov Dmitry Chernyshenko, Yury Trutnev, Tatiana Golikova and Alexander Novak will speak at the Russia-China meeting in expanded format as chairs of bilateral commissions, Ushakov added.
Russia’s major businesspeople, including aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, Sberbank CEO Herman Gref, VTB Bank CEO Andrey Kostin, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and Leonid Mikhelson, the co-owner of Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer Novatek, will also accompany Putin in his trip to China.
Preparations for the visit of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Russia are underway, Yury Ushakov also noted.
“Yes, active preparations are underway,” he mentioned.
In early April, Palestinian Ambassador to Russia Abdel Hafiz Nofal said that the date of Abbas’ visit to Russia will be set “soon.”
“We have some international trips planned in the near future,” Ushakov told reporters, when asked about Putin’s potential international trips, including his visit to Turkiye.
Military and civilian authorities in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region paid millions of dollars to fake companies for the supply of non-existent building materials to construct defensive fortifications, the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda reported on Monday. With no fortifications built, Russian forces have advanced rapidly through the region.
Russia has seized dozens of towns and villages in the northern part of Kharkov Region after launching an offensive last Friday. According to the latest update from the Russian Defense Ministry, Russian troops had captured the village of Bugrovatka on Monday and are inflicting losses on Ukrainian manpower and hardware near Veseloye, Volchansk, and Liptsi, the latter of which is located just 20km from the outskirts of Kharkov city.
Writing in Ukrainska Pravda on Monday, Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Martina Boguslavets explained that Kharkov’s Department of Housing and Communal Services (ZhKG) and Regional Military Administration (OVA) had been given 7 billion hryvnias ($176.5 million to build fortifications to hold back this advance.
Much of this money was embezzled, Boguslavets claimed. For the supply of wood, the ZhKG and OVA signed contracts worth 270 million hryvnias ($6.8 million) with five companies that were set up immediately after the contracts were announced. No bidding process took place, and at least two of these companies were owned by the same person, Boguslavets wrote.
“Moreover, the owners of these firms do not resemble successful businessmen and businesswomen,” she wrote. “They have dozens of court cases, from whiskey theft to domestic violence against a husband and mother; some of them are deprived of parental rights and have had enforcement proceedings for bank loans.”
Boguslavets described these business owners as “avatars,” placed in charge of the companies either for a small fee or without their knowledge. One of the supposed CEOs, whose firm was paid 52 million hryvnias ($1.3 million) is an agricultural laborer, according to Boguslavets’ documents.
“The naked eye can see how a government official mercilessly registers new companies, using for this purpose people who, due to the circumstances, may not be aware of this,” she wrote. “And this someone continues to make money on blood.”
The lack of defensive fortifications allowed Russian forces to enter Kharkov Region almost unopposed, Denis Yaroslavsky, commander of a Ukrainian special reconnaissance unit, told the BBC on Monday. “There was no first line of defense. We saw it. The Russians just walked in. They just walked in, without any mined fields,” Yaroslavsky said.
“Either it was an act of negligence or corruption. It wasn’t a failure. It was a betrayal,” he added.
The story of the embezzled defense money is the latest in a long series of tales of corruption to emerge from Ukraine. Earlier this week, Poland canceled trade talks with Kiev after Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Nikolay Solsky was accused of illegally appropriating state land worth nearly $7.4 million. Several months earlier, Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, announced that it had uncovered a major embezzlement scheme in which Ukrainian officials and private contractors stole around $40 million earmarked for shell procurement.
The United States and its Western allies have stepped up a media campaign to accuse India of running an assassination policy targeting expatriate dissidents.
The government of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has furiously denied the allegations, saying there is no such policy.
Nevertheless, the American Biden administration as well as Canada, Britain and Australia continue to demand accountability over claims that New Delhi is engaging in “transnational repression” of spying, harassing and killing Indian opponents living in Western states.
The accusations have severely strained political relations. The most fractious example is Canada. After Premier Justin Trudeau publicly accused Indian state agents of involvement in the murder of an Indian-born Canadian citizen last year, New Delhi expelled dozens of Canadian diplomats.
Relations became further strained this month when the Washington Postpublished a long article purporting to substantiate claims that Indian security services were organizing assassinations of U.S. and Canadian citizens. The Post named high-level Indian intelligence chiefs in the inner circle of Prime Minister Modi. The implication is a policy of political killings is sanctioned at the very top of the Indian government.
The targets of the alleged murder program are members of the Sikh diaspora. There are large expatriate populations of Sikhs in the U.S., Canada and Britain. In recent years, there has been a renewed campaign among Sikhs for the secession of their homeland of Punjab from India. The New Delhi government views the separatist calls for a new state called Khalistan as a threat to Indian territorial integrity. The Modi government has labeled Sikh separatists as terrorists.
Indian authorities have carried out repression of Sikhs for decades including political assassination in the Punjab territory of northern India. Many Sikhs fled to the United States and other Western states for safety and to continue their agitation for a separate nation. The Modi government has accused Western states of coddling “Sikh terrorists” and undermining Indian sovereignty.
Last June, a prominent Sikh leader was gunned down in a suburb of Vancouver in what appeared to be a professional hit-style execution. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered by three assailants outside a religious temple. Indian state media described him as a terrorist, but Nijjar’s family denied he had any involvement in terrorism. They claim that he was targeted simply because he promoted Punjabi separatism.
At the same time, according to the Post report, the U.S. authorities thwarted a murder plot against a well-known American-Sikh citizen who was a colleague of the Canadian victim. Both men were coordinating efforts to hold an unofficial referendum among the Sikh diaspora in North America calling for the establishment of a new independent state of Khalistan in the Punjab region of northern India.
The Post article names Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s state spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), as orchestrating the murder plots against the Sikh leaders. The Post claims that interviews with US and former Indian intelligence officials attest that the killings could not have been carried out without the sanction of Modi’s inner circle.
A seemingly curious coincidence is that within days of the murder of the Canadian Sikh leader and the attempted killing of the American colleague, President Biden was hosting Narendra Modi at the White House in a lavish state reception.
Since the summer of last year, the Biden administration has repeatedly pressured the Modi government to investigate the allegations. President Biden has personally contacted Modi about the alleged assassination policy as have his senior officials, including White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA director William Burns. Despite New Delhi’s denial of such a policy, the Modi government has acceded to American requests to hold an internal investigation, suggesting a tacit admission of its agents having some involvement.
But here is where an anomaly indicates an ulterior agenda. Even U.S. media have remarked on how lenient the Biden administration has been towards India over what are grave allegations. It is inconceivable that Washington would tolerate the presence of Russian or Chinese agents and diplomats on its territory if Moscow and Beijing were implicated in killing dissidents on American soil.
As Tthe Washington Post report noted: “Last July, White House officials began holding high-level meetings to discuss ways to respond without risking a wider rupture with India, officials said. CIA Director William J. Burns and others have been deployed to confront officials in the Modi government and demand accountability. But the United States has so far imposed no expulsions, sanctions or other penalties.”
What appears to be going on is a calculated form of coercion by the United States and its Western allies. The allegations of contract killings and “transnational repression” against Sikhs in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany are aimed at intimidating the Indian government with further embarrassing media disclosures and Western sanctions. The U.S. State Department and the Congress have both recently highlighted claims of human rights violations by the Modi government and calls for political sanctions.
The objective, it can be averred, is for Washington and its Western allies to pressure India into toeing a geopolitical line of hostility towards China and Russia.
During the Biden administration, the United States has assiduously courted India as a partner in the Asia-Pacific to confront China. India has been welcomed as a member of the U.S.-led Quad of powers, including Japan and Australia. The Quad overlaps with the U.S. security interests of the AUKUS military partnership with Britain and Australia.
Another major geopolitical prize for Washington and its allies is to drive a wedge between India and Russia.
Since the NATO proxy war blew up in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has been continually cajoling India to condemn Russia and to abide by Western sanctions against Moscow. Despite the relentless pressure, the Modi government has spurned Western attempts to isolate Russia. Indeed, India has increased its purchase of Russian crude oil and is importing record quantities, more than ever before the Ukraine conflict.
Furthermore, India is a key member of the BRICS forum and a proponent of an emerging multipolar world order that undermines U.S.-led Western hegemony.
From the viewpoint of the United States and its Western allies, India represents a tantalizing strategic prospect. With a foot in both geopolitical camps, New Delhi is sought by the West to weaken the China-Russia-BRICS axis.
This is the geopolitical context for understanding the interest of Western powers in making an issue out of allegations of political assassination by the Modi government. Washington and its Western allies want to use the allegations as a form of leverage – or blackmail – on India to comply with geopolitical objectives to confront China and Russia.
It can be anticipated that the Western powers will amplify the media campaign against India in line with exerting more hostility toward China and Russia.
As the Russia-Ukraine war drags on, a peace conference is to be held in Switzerland this summer. But Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said that Russia hadn’t been invited to participate in June’s talks. “It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad,” he commented.
Practically all Russian commentators, and even some prominent Western ones, trace the roots of the conflict in Ukraine to NATO’s attempts at incorporating Russia’s neighbor – as officially stated since at least as far back as 2008. A disregard for Russia’s status as an equal and sovereign partner was evident in the contempt for the Minsk agreements, which both former German chancellor Angela Merkel and former French president Fran?ois Hollande described as gimmicks to buy time for the only option that was seriously pursued, military confrontation. Later on, Vladimir Putin’s vocal request for security guarantees was dismissed yet again.
Fast forward a few years, and this historical tragedy has snowballed to its extreme conclusions. Politico recently reported Ukrainian officials’ concerns about a collapse of the frontlines. As Elon Musk calls for a negotiated settlement to come soon, he warns that the longer the war drags on, the larger the territory Russia will seek to annex. Even CNN is now explaining how Russia’s guided bombs are wreaking havoc on Ukrainian defenses. Meanwhile, the IMF has raised Russia’s growth outlook. In short, and irrespective of whether this will take weeks, months or years, Russia is well placed politically, economically and militarily to inflict the final blow.
The conditions of Ukraine’s sponsors are remarkably less favorable. Europe’s economic problems are “far bigger than a shallow recession.” The Union faces a dilemma over restricting imports from Ukraine or throwing its own agriculture under the bus. It is also split on the use of frozen Russian assets to finance the war. The Union will renew its Parliament in June and it is unclear whether Ursula von der Leyen will be re-elected. Even though the US House of Representatives on Saturday passed a $95 billion legislative package, including $60.84 billion to address the conflict in Ukraine, the US’ presidential elections in November still cast another shadow of uncertainty, to the point that NATO is considering setting aside “Trump-proof” funds.
Europe’s public opinion has also made up its mind on the matter. Only one in ten Europeans believe Ukraine can defeat Russia. The Pope has literally invited Ukraine to raise a white flag. Wolfgang Streeck, the Director of the Max Planck Institute, said, “The war is lost but our governments refuse to admit it.” A crushing military defeat would be the worst possible background for European and American elections, and erode confidence in the respective leaderships: The West should not fall prey to a sunk cost fallacy of catastrophic proportions. What would then be the way forward?
The rational course of action would be for the West to turn to diplomacy to correct such a disastrous trajectory, much like Musk and the Pope suggested. Even if Russia refused, or the attempt failed, the West would at least claim the moral high ground on this occasion. A comprehensive peace conference with the involvement of representative guarantors from the Global South could offer a lifeline to Ukraine, and a model for ironing out geopolitical tensions that are dangerously multiplying all over the world. Chinese diplomacy is going out of its way to make this possible, and the African Union, Brazil, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and many others have also stepped forward with constructive proposals.
Yet leaders on both shores of the Atlantic are headed elsewhere. US Vice President Kamala Harris and European Council President Charles Michel are adamant that “There is only plan A”: military support for Ukraine. Along this path, some risky decisions appear increasingly likely. And pressure is mounting to use seized Russian assets to finance Ukraine. Of this move, in 2022, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said “would not be legal.” But, apparently, a green light could come at the G7 summit in June.
If a botched peace conference would exact high reputational costs for Western diplomacy, the seizing of Russian assets could turn into a kamikaze attack, and unsettle the very domain wherein the West retains relative dominance, the international financial system. Neither initiative is likely to end the conflict in Ukraine.
If all such workarounds are really only dead ends, a reckoning with reality should be hastened rather than delayed. Yet, it is precisely the unwillingness or inability to confront the reality of the situation that got us here in the first place.
Beijing is “enabling” Moscow in the Ukraine conflict, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has claimed, arguing that the US-led bloc has to be involved in Asia and not just in the North Atlantic.
Stoltenberg’s comments came during a question-and-answer panel at the NATO Youth Summit, in response to an inquiry from a Yale University student in the US.
“The war in Ukraine demonstrates that security is not regional, security is global,” Stoltenberg said. “The main country that is enabling Russia to conduct its war of aggression against Ukraine in Europe, is China.”
Stoltenberg went on to argue that China is “by far the biggest trading partner” of Russia, supplying Moscow with “critical components” for missiles, drones and other weapons. He also accused Iran of “providing drones” to Russia and North Korea of “providing ammunition and weapons.”
“Iran, North Korea and China, they are key for Russia’s capability to fight against [the] European friend [and] neighbor of NATO,” Stoltenberg said, referring to Ukraine. “So, this idea that we can divide Asia from Europe doesn’t work anymore.”
The US had pushed for NATO to expand its mission into Asia long before the Ukraine conflict boiled over in February 2022, however. Washington also appears to have been the source of claims that Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang provided weapons and ammunition to Moscow, without offering much in the way of evidence to back that up.
China has repeatedly rejected pressure from the US and its allies to join their embargo against Russia, calling it unilateral and illegitimate. Beijing has also proposed a peace plan for the Ukraine conflict, which Moscow seemed interested in, but Kiev and its Western backers rejected.
Russia has denied US claims about North Korean weapons and ammunition deliveries. Iran has clarified that it provided Russia with prototypes and plans for drones before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, suggesting that Moscow has been producing them domestically.
The US and its allies have sent over $200 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and cash to Ukraine over the past two years, while insisting that this does not make them direct participants in the conflict.
Eight-year-old Ritaj survived for two days under the rubble when an Israeli strike killed her family. Doctors operated on her leg multiple times and ended up amputating it. Now, Ritaj lives in a crowded shelter with her aunt, and she just wants the war to end.
A very telling pair of graphs from Ole Humlum’s Climate4You :
We can debate the reasons for less cloud cover, but generally speaking less cloud/more sunshine leads to higher temperatures. (Certain high level clouds may have the reverse effect, but this is small).
Even the Met Office admitted this a few years ago, in a study they have since buried.
In particular, it is the sun that predominantly heats the oceans. The equilibrium effect on the seas from a slightly warmer atmosphere are so small as to be unmeasurable.
In alarmist world, of course, CO2 is the only driver of global temperatures, so don’t expect them to mention that cloud cover has been a major factor behind global warming in recent decades.
Last week, Israel seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing, the only entry point into Gaza not controlled by Israel and where the largest amount of aid was entering the Gaza Strip. Israel has halted all shipments entering through the Rafah border crossings and the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing, citing nearby fighting.
Israel has completely stopped all aid shipments going into Gaza, Lebanon-based journalist and geopolitical analyst Leila Hatoum told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Monday.
“They control the whole area and… they have shut down all border crossings. Nothing has entered Rafah or Gaza for the past eight days. Israelis have shut down all borders,” Hatoum explained, citing her sources on the ground in Gaza.
“Nothing has entered Gaza, not even water, flour, medicine, children’s needs, baby formula, hygienic products. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever,” she emphasized.
On Monday, videos emerged on social media showing Israeli citizens destroying aid intended for Gaza on trucks waiting to cross the Tarqumiya checkpoint. There doesn’t appear to be any police presence attempting to stop the looters in the videos. According to media reports, four individuals were arrested at the scene.
🚨BREAKING: More footage of “civilians” inside israel blocking aid trucks today and destroying the desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza at the Tarkamiya checkpoint.
“The aid that the State of Israel transfers goes directly into the hands of Hamas,” the organization that organized the blockade, Order 9, said in a statement.
It was only the latest in a string of videos showing Israelis sabotaging aid trucks on their way to Gaza, another video released late last month showed Israelis destroying bags of flour, again without visible police resistance.
Israelis destroying the flour that was meant to feed starving people in Gaza.
Also on Monday, Israeli forces opened fire on an officially marked UN vehicle, killing one UN employee and injuring another. Later in the day, according to Israeli Rights group HaMoked, a group of young Israelis set fire to the perimeter of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) headquarters in East Jerusalem. It was the second incident of arson at the headquarters this week.
UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres called for an investigation and condemned the attack on the UN vehicle. As of May 1, at least 182 UNRWA employees have been killed in Gaza.
At least 370,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah ahead of Israel’s promised ground war and continued bombardment of the last remaining refuge in Gaza, but many complain that there is no safe place to go.
“Every single place in Gaza, across [the] north all the way down to the south, is being bombarded by the Israelis,” Hatoum relayed. “Back in January and February we were warning that famine is going to hit north Gaza, people will die of starvation and nobody believed us, and then we started seeing people dying of starvation – children first and then others.”
At least 35,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, though that number is presumed to be a low-count as thousands of bodies are believed to remain under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
Incredibly the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway.
We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest.
It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes. Any thought that their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts to suppress dissent and obscure the truth.
Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with the alleged norms of Western society it is almost impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few examples.
1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out operation after operation, mostly on women and children, as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned around him.
He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University.
When Germany banned him from entering to address the conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as a one-off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked reaction to pro-Palestinian expression.
We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is possible to have some understanding of how it occurred.
But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he was also banned from France. That appeared again something that was almost a technical accident as regards the rest of Europe.
But the Western political establishment has now doubled down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this time the Dutch government has made it clear that it supports the ban, and is not just caught by a Schengen restriction.
So the major governments of the European Union are forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the willingness of the Western political class to abandon the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in the interests of Israel.
2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme violence against pro-Palestinian students on college campuses is another demonstration of the same abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a serious generational divide in Western public opinion, with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in the USA).
This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal.
In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no longer has popular support and now causes public revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them.
3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic “choice” in the West.
Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel” lately, and to row back from his straightforward assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire” to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable” ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives.
But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an address to US Republican senators in which he made the totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale.
4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian, despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and children we have seen on our mobile phones this past seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal attack is on “Hamas militants”.
The bombing and shelling of civilians in tents is still described as “clashes”. This propaganda really does not wash any more, though it may reinforce the morale of hardened Zionists. Everybody else has seen through it months ago. Yet still they persist.
5) The endgame is becoming very apparent. The United States is completing its floating harbour for Gaza, and Israel has gained control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, giving the US and Israel total control of entry points into Gaza. Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control.
The Israeli attack on Rafah has been justified by the USA as a “limited military operation”, thus claiming it does not violate Biden’s purported “red line”, even though Israel has ordered over a million displaced people in Rafah to evacuate again, to nowhere.
Conclusion:
The only possible conclusion from all of the above is to reinforce my analysis that the Zionist political and media classes in the West, including Biden, Blinken, Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz, von der Leyen and all, are active and willing participants in a programme of genocide.
They had numerous opportunities to turn back. We all saw what is happening months ago. They did not take the opportunities.
The endgame remains the processing of the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza through the US-controlled points of the Rafah crossing and the floating harbour, primarily into camps in the Sinai desert. The Western powers are doubling down on their genocide and on their colonial project.
I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?
Israel has been threatening a full-scale invasion of the Gazan city of Rafah for months, with the US government belatedly warning against the move and calling for a ceasefire. However, the Biden administration has consistently flip-flopped on the issue and refused to take serious measures to pressure Israel into reaching a deal.
On May 6, Hamas publicly announced that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal, triggering celebrations throughout Gaza. The rejoicing was short-lived though, as the Israeli government reiterated its refusal to accept a deal and pledged instead to launch a ground operation in Gaza’s southernmost city, despite US government objections.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even stated that “the day after is the day after Hamas. All of Hamas,” meaning there is no ceasefire deal he will accept.
Despite the Israeli military capturing the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt, in addition to killing dozens of civilians after bombing 100 targets throughout Rafah, Israel announced that a delegation had been sent to Cairo to “exhaust” all possibilities of reaching a ceasefire. As it would later turn out, the ceasefire proposal that Hamas accepted was almost identical to one drafted by the CIA and Israeli intelligence, and lauded by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as a “strong proposal”.
Meanwhile, in cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv, Israeli protesters – led by the families of captives held in Gaza – had taken to the streets to demand their government accept the ceasefire terms, which included the release of all Israeli prisoners. Clashing with the police and labeling the Netanyahu government liars, the demonstrators threatened to burn the country if their prisoners were not freed.
The US response the very next day was to gaslight reporters by telling them that the whole world was wrong and that Hamas had not accepted any ceasefire proposal. It was not long before US President Joe Biden was to sit down for an interview with CNN and state that he would not supply Israel with offensive weaponry to be used in a “major invasion” of Rafah. What he refused to do, however, was define what a major invasion means – and where the red line is.
This unclear approach comes after the Israeli military violated the terms of the 1979 Camp David agreement, which normalized ties between Egypt and Israel, by invading what is known as the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza. Not only did the Israeli army send in its Givati Brigades, who published videos of themselves recklessly crushing the border crossing for fun, they also sealed off the key aid route to Gaza’s civilian population, who are on the brink of famine.
A weak and confusing American approach
The Israeli government has been threatening to invade Rafah since the start of the year, with Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly asserting, since the beginning of February, that Israel will “lose the war” if there is no invasion. it’s a move that the US not only says will mean defeat militarily, but more importantly, threatens the lives of over a million civilians, most of whom have nowhere else to go.
In early March, Biden gave a confusing interview to MSNBC, where he repeatedly contradicted himself when addressing the issue of an Israeli invasion of Rafah.
While claiming that entering Rafah is a “red line,” he then said that “there’s no red line [where] I’m going to cut off all weapons… but there’s red lines that if he crosses them”, before he seemed to lose his train of thought.
The sudden changes in the stance of policymakers in Washington are not limited to Biden’s MSNBC interview. In early February, the US said it would oppose an invasion of Rafah, calling it a “disaster,” to which the Israeli prime minister responded that he was preparing his forces to invade – and ramped up aerial attacks on the area. Yet, in mid-February the US government prepared a $14 billion military aid package for Israel and would go on to say that it could only support a limited invasion of Rafah.
Then there were reports that emerged, citing unnamed US officials, alleging that Biden was growing frustrated with Netanyahu and that he had even sworn at him. There was then the American push towards a “six-week ceasefire” in March, which the US president publicly said he hoped would happen prior to the Muslim Holy month of Ramadan. Even now, the Biden administration is still talking about an alleged “six-week ceasefire”, despite its own proposal to Hamas being a detailed agreement designed to end the war or at least to last for several months.
Silently, the US approved over 100 weapons transfers to assist the war effort against Gaza, in which they used loopholes to avoid Washington’s own new laws on weapons sales. Then, with two weeks left until the end of Ramadan, the US finally abstained in a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) vote, which called on Israel to implement a ceasefire until the end of the Muslim Holy month. In response, Israel immediately canceled the pre-planned visit of a high-level American delegation to Tel Aviv.
However, the very next morning, following the passing of the UN Security Council resolution, the US State Department announced that the resolution was non-binding. This not only meant that Washington was denying the reality of the internationally understood consensus that all UNSC votes are by their nature binding, but also that it would allow Israel to violate the resolution. So, even though Washington technically took a measure to pressure its ally temporarily, the very next day it gave an informal veto of the resolution, signaling to the Israeli government that it would retain American support no matter what.
While admitting that an invasion of Rafah will inevitably lead to the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, and block humanitarian aid transfers during an impending famine, and that it will not lead to the collapse of Hamas or the return of Israeli prisoners, the US government is effectively twiddling its thumbs.
The US has had nearly seven months to formulate a coherent policy when it comes to its goals and red lines in the Gaza-Israel war, yet it cannot articulate what its red lines are – and what ceasefire it even desires – without constantly contradicting itself. Western corporate media are now pointing to the postponing of a singular weapons shipment to Israel by the Biden administration, as if this constitutes pressure. But the US has done nothing to force Israel to allow aid to pass through the Rafah Crossing, which it immediately called upon Israel to do.
At this point, the US government is not helping to achieve Israel’s publicly stated war aims, it is not helping the families of Israeli prisoners, and it has failed to achieve a ceasefire or the sufficient transfer of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Instead, Joe Biden appears to be doing one thing – helping Benjamin Netanyahu prolong the conflict, with no end goal, no exit strategy, and no political solution or even the most basic idea of a post-war situation on the horizon. If anything, the US government has proven itself to be incapable of playing any constructive role to any side’s benefit. In fact, it is detrimental to the situation. If there were any people of conscience left in Washington, they would be urging their colleagues to step aside and hand the issue over to nations with coherent foreign policy platforms and intelligent diplomats.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
A Geneva-based rights group has condemned the Israeli regime forces for using children as human shields in their assaults on Palestinians.
The Defense for Children International (DCI) said it heard testimonies of three children who described how they were used as human shields by occupying Israeli forces during a recent search and assault operation in the West Bank’s Tulkarm refugee camp, the Middle East Eye on Sunday reported.
The DCI said the Palestinian children said on May 5 and May 6 Israeli soldiers had forced them to walk ahead of them as they searched through the refugee camp, describing two instances in which the Israeli regime forces had placed their rifles on their shoulders.
One teen named Kareem recounted how Israeli forces stormed his family’s apartment on May 6 and then forced him to lead them through the apartment block as they carried out a search operation in the building. The teen said the soldiers had placed a loaded rifle on his shoulders and fired two shots toward one of the apartment’s entrances.
Another child, Mohammad, said during a raid on his home, he was forcibly separated from his family by the Israeli forces.
“I remained alone with the soldiers after they instructed my mother and siblings to climb to the fourth floor of the building. I started crying and trembling with fear because I didn’t know what they would do to me. They were armed, masked, and their appearance was terrifying, accompanied by a large police dog making frightening noises,” Mohammad said.
He said they told him to knock on each apartment door in the building and tell the residents in the apartments to leave their homes.
Mohammad said if an apartment was empty and no one answered, the armed men would enter by force.
“When we reached the door of one of the apartments and found it empty, the soldiers blew up the door and forced me to enter alone to inspect it,” said the Palestinian child.
Ibrahim, another Palestinian teen, recounted how on the morning of May 6, Israeli forces stormed his family’s home in the Tulkarm refugee camp in a “brutal and terrifying manner,” searching and vandalizing their belongings.
He said, “A group of soldiers took me to one of the rooms and began interrogating me. When I told them I knew nothing, one of them threatened me in Arabic and said (I’ll smash you if you don’t talk). Then he physically assaulted me for several minutes before handcuffing my hands behind my back with a plastic tie. They then took me outside and asked me to walk in front of the soldiers.”
“I was trembling with fear and terror. At first, I thought they wanted to arrest me, but they asked me to walk in front of them in the alleys of the Al-Sawalme neighborhood in the camp. They would hide in the alley and ask me to show the way. After that, they released my hands, and every time we passed by a house or building, they would ask me to enter and ask the residents to leave and head towards the soldiers, after which they would raid those homes. During the raids, they would ask me to open the internal doors of the houses and apartments.”
Ibrahim said after about two hours of searching the camp, the Israelis took him to a house in the camp where he was detained alongside others until the Israeli forces withdrew from the camp.
In the meantime, the use of Palestinians as human shields by Israeli regime forces in numerous cases has been well documented by multiple human rights organizations.
Israeli regime forces put Palestinian civilians in front of them or otherwise put civilians in the line of fire, and force them to open doors that could be booby-trapped or remove suspicious objects that might be bombs. They also force them to walk through suspected booby-trapped buildings.
The Zionist forces also often employ the “neighbor procedure” in which Palestinian civilians are forced to attempt to persuade individuals to leave or surrender themselves.
“International law is explicit and absolutely prohibits the use of children as human shields by armed forces or armed groups,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Accountability Program director at the DCIP, adding, “Israeli forces intentionally putting a child in grave danger in order to shield themselves constitutes a war crime.”
For decades, both Palestinian children as well as adults have been used by the Israeli forces during operations as human shields.
The use of civilians as human shields is one of many war crimes committed by the Israeli regime forces.
… Most American adults of voting age don’t appear willing to reject the applicability of international law to Israel’s ongoing colonization of occupied territories in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights. … Full article
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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It was only the latest in a string of videos showing Israelis sabotaging aid trucks on their way to Gaza, another video released late last month showed Israelis destroying bags of flour, again without visible police resistance.
In the meantime, the use of Palestinians as human shields by Israeli regime forces in numerous cases has been well documented by multiple human rights organizations.
