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Macron’s Olympic truce call takes gold for western cynicism

Strategic Culture Foundation | April 19, 2024

French President Emmanuel Macron wants a truce in Ukraine and Gaza for the duration of the Olympic Games in Paris this summer.

Macron said this week that his proposal is consistent with the ancient concept of an Olympic Truce when, historically, hostilities would be put to the side to showcase higher ideals of human fraternity and peaceful aspiration. In short, demonstration of the edifying notion that sport is above politics.

Russia responded that it was not against the idea in principle. However, Moscow pointed out that Macron’s Olympic peace idea lacks any practical details to vouchsafe a genuine initiative.

To put it more bluntly, the French leader has no credibility to proffer such a potentially important accord. His vague proposal is riddled with contradictions.

Only a few weeks ago, Macron was airing the idea of sending NATO troops to fight in Ukraine against Russia. He has not retracted that reckless provocation, which could escalate the conflict to a world war between nuclear powers.

Now we are to believe that Monsieur President is a tribune for world peace.

Paris and other NATO capitals are desperately pushing for more weapons to be sent to the NeoNazi regime in Kiev. The NATO proxy war against Russia is in its third year and is increasingly looking like a lost cause for Washington and its Western allies. Not one Western leader is prepared to give up the ghost of this bloody debacle to strategically defeat Russia by exploring a diplomatic solution to the war.

How then can Macron’s supposed concern for an Olympic Truce be taken seriously?

As for Gaza, France and its NATO partners have been complicit in sponsoring a genocide over the past six and half months. The Israeli regime’s massacre of over 34,000 Palestinians – a death toll that mounts every week – and its continuing starvation siege on the Gaza Strip are crucially enabled by the military and political support of the United States and the European Union.

As if that is not bad enough, France, the United States and Britain are de facto supporting Israel’s aggression towards Iran, as well as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. The Western trio are helping Israel’s air defenses while at the same time condemning Iran and imposing economic sanctions. Their tacit involvement is green-lighting more Israeli belligerence and violation of international laws which is corroding the entire fabric of global security.

Given the appalling culpability of the Western powers in fueling these explosive conflicts, it is the height of duplicity for Macron to turn around and make his pompous proposal for a truce during the Summer Games being held in Paris from July 26 to August 11.

The real concern for Macron is to showcase France in all its presumed greatness in a worldwide spectacle.

The narcissistic Macron is driven by self-aggrandizing ambition and delusions of grandeur as a world statesman and the president who restored France’s international prestige. It is this same megalomania that drives his recent calls for greater NATO involvement in the proxy war in Ukraine. The former Rothschild banker and now Napoleon wannabe is a charlatan who is completely bereft of any principles.

Significantly, the opening ceremony for the Summer Games is planned to take place along the Seine River in the form of an extravagant regatta. This arrangement breaks with the modern tradition of all Olympics being opened in the main stadium that hosts the sporting events. The Stade de France is located outside the French capital. One gets the distinct impression that Macron wants the grand opening to be televised in the center of Paris simply for the purpose of showing off the capital and its renowned cultural landmarks.

For Macron, the quadrennial games are first and foremost all about displaying France in the best possible light to the world for political and commercial exhibition. The games themselves are a vehicle for his vainglorious ambitions.

The truth is the Olympic Games and other international sporting events have long been hijacked by Western politics for their imperialist agenda.

When the U.S. and its NATO allies were waging illegal wars in countless countries in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, there were never calls for an Olympic Truce. There were never calls for banning the U.S. and its allies from participating in games even though there were substantial grounds for such calls.

Russian athletes have for several years now been banned from sporting events based solely on trumped-up claims about drug abuse and other alleged infringements. As our columnist Declan Hayes has pointed out in several articles, Russia’s figure-skating champion Kamila Valieva and its other world-class athletes have been subjected to relentless Western efforts to destroy their reputations and participation in “NATO sporting circuses”.

Shamefully, the Western powers and their toxic mass media have done everything to ensure that politics are above sports. Sporting events have become just another adjunct of Western propaganda.

If Macron had any genuine motive for international peace, he would be calling for an end to arming the NeoNazi regime in Ukraine and advocating a credible diplomatic engagement with Russia.

If Macron earnestly wanted the Olympic Games to serve as an overture for peace and humanity, he would be calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and full respect for Palestinian national and human rights.

The Western-controlled International Olympic Committee has banned Russian athletes from participating in the games in Paris under their national flag. Their “concession” is that 40 Russian sportspeople may take part as long as they do so under a “neutral flag” and that they do not display any signs of supporting Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. Why were such strictures not imposed on Americans or Britons during their criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Russia is banned yet Israel is allowed to send a full team in national colors while it conducts the worst genocide in modern times. The Western hypocrisy here is absolutely revolting and self-indicting.

Like a Greek tragedy, the rampant cynicism and abuse by Western powers are destroying the Olympic Games, the very event that they are trying to monopolize for their nauseating virtue signaling.

In a crowded Western field competing for the dubious title, Macron takes gold for cynicism.

April 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Western leaders reveal their total contempt for Palestinian lives

By Dimitri Lascaris | April 11, 2024

Six months into Israel’s genocide, Western leaders continue to issue statements that reveal their total contempt for Palestinian lives.

The Prime Ministers of Canada and France have just issued a joint statement.

In it, they declare that they “unequivocally condemn” Russia’s “ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine”.

They also claim to be “extremely concerned” about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and “the appalling situation of the civilian population.”

They “condemn” the strike that resulted in the deaths of several World Central Kitchen workers, including a Canadian citizen, and “emphasize Israel’s obligation, under international humanitarian law, to allow and facilitate the unfettered access of humanitarian aid to Gaza and to protect humanitarian workers and the civilian population.”

Also, “in the strongest possible terms”, they “condemn” the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel on October 7 and “call for the immediate, unconditional release of all hostages.”

So let’s get this straight.

In six months, Israel has killed more than three times as many civilians in Gaza as have died in more than two years of war in Ukraine.

And yet, the French and Canadian Prime Ministers still can’t bring themselves to “condemn” Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian civilians, including nearly 14,000 Palestinian children.

With respect to Israel’s crimes, they use the word “condemn” only once, but they apply it not to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Rather, they apply it to Israel’s massacre of aid workers who *came from Western countries*.

It is now beyond obvious that Western ‘leaders’ attach little to no value to the lives of Palestinians. These people are anti-Palestinians racists masquerading as champions of human rights.

@dimitrilascaris

April 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brussels Fears “Disinformation” Campaign Before EU Elections

By Zoltán Kottász | The European Conservative | April 9, 2024

In a bid to protect this year’s European election campaign from “disinformation” and “foreign interference,” the European Commission has asked the European political groups to sign a code of conduct. By pressuring them to “commit to maintaining the integrity of the 2024 European Parliament elections. Brussels seems to be preparing to pursue sovereigntists, whose campaign messages are often labelled as “Russian disinformation.”

Nevertheless, the document was signed on Tuesday, April 9th, by all the European umbrella groups, including the right-wing Identity and Democracy Party (ID), whose members―such as the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party―are regularly accused of spreading “false Russian narratives.” The ID party may have agreed to the code of conduct, as it is non-binding and does not apply to national parties, who are responsible for their respective national campaigns before the EU elections in June.

According to the document, “by following this code, the signatories uphold key election values like integrity, transparency, privacy, safety, fairness, and a level playing field.” The groups are urged, among other things, to abstain from disseminating misleading content, using artificial intelligence to deceptively manipulate audio or video content, and sharing “content created and disseminated by actors from outside the EU” that seek to “erode European values and principles.” This conveniently ignores controversies about the actual meaning and content of “European values,” usually defined by Eurocrats as aligning with their values, regardless of the opinions of individual states or parties.The new rule on content sharing is, of course, a reference to Russian interference, a recurring theme of Brussels’ anti-propaganda rhetoric. The EU’s Values and Transparency Commissioner Věra Jourová, who brokered the agreement, recently warned that democracy is in danger from Russian proxies throughout the EU. In response, she has therefore embarked on a “democracy tour” of EU capitals to promote action against alleged Russian disinformation. The commissioner claimed that many of Europe’s populist right-wing parties are part of the Kremlin’s propaganda network, and that her “biggest concern” was Germany’s AfD.

The AfD has been riding high in opinion polls in Germany, and is set to win all three regional elections to be held in Eastern German states in the autumn. The party’s success has come mainly from its tough line on immigration, but also its criticism of the German federal government’s sending military aid to Ukraine. Cutting off the country from much-needed Russian gas supplies has sparked a cost-of-living and energy crisis. Calls for peace instead of EU military intervention have also resonated with Hungarian and Slovakian voters, yet Jourová insists that the message of peace comes from the Kremlin, and is the equivalent of appeasing Russia.

The new code of conduct aligns with the Commission’s so-called Defence of Democracy package, intended as a tool to tackle the threat of foreign interference by requiring groups working for foreign countries outside the EU to self-record in a transparency register. “Foreign interference in our democratic systems is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. It is high time to bring covert foreign influence to light,” the Commission wrote in December.

The code of conduct also lines up with a resolution recently adopted by the European Parliament, which seeks to punish hate crime and hate speech, but has been criticised by conservative parties for eroding freedom of speech. The code stipulates that the signatories shall refrain “from producing, using or disseminating discriminatory statements and biases against specific groups based on their gender, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation.”

April 11, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

German democracy index claims Hungarian democracy worse than Ukraine’s despite Kyiv canceling elections and operating under martial law

By Denes Albert | Remix News | April 10, 2024

Ukraine, which no longer holds elections, is ahead of Hungary in terms of democracy, according to a major German media group index that references 10 experts, nine of whom are directly funded by billionaire oligarch George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

The results were produced by the German Bertelsmann Foundation’s democracy index, which was published in the print edition of the media group’s Frankfurter Allurement Zeitung.

Despite Hungary having a functioning and vibrant democracy that includes actual elections, the index claims that the country is less democratic than Ukraine, which is under martial law, has banned opposition parties, and has no elections.

According to the paper’s analyst, the new EU member states have made huge political and economic progress since 2004, with only Poland and Hungary representing or still representing a “politically authoritarian tendency.”

“Despite the country’s EU membership, Fidesz, led by Viktor Orbán and in power since 2010, has seriously undermined Hungary’s initially well-functioning democracy,” claims Ralph M. Wrobel, who argues that without pressure from Brussels, Poland and Hungary would have become fully authoritarian states.

It is worth noting, however, that the Bertelsmann Foundation’s biannual ranking is based on the opinions of country experts, not on facts.

“Nine of the ten ‘independent experts on Hungary’ are from Political Capital. Political Capital, founded by a former SZDSZ member, which received contracts worth hundreds of millions of forints from the previous Socialist governments of Ferenc Gyurcsány and Gordon Bajnai for communications consultancy, and of course among its supporters we find the Open Society Foundations led by George Soros,” government spokesman Zoltán Kovács pointed out earlier.

Kovács added that the Bertelsmann Group is the owner of RTL Television, among others. In a previous analysis, Hungarian news portal Mandiner pointed out that the group had woven its way into the EU institutions by hiding behind pro-Europeanism.

See also:

April 10, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | 1 Comment

US says Palestinian statehood should be done through direct negotiations not UN venue

Press TV – April 4, 2024

After vowing to block a push by Palestine to become a full member of the United Nations, the United States says the world body is not an appropriate venue to negotiate Palestinian statehood.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday that although Washington does “support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state”, the venue through which the Palestinian statehood should be discussed would not be the UN.

“That is something that should be done through direct negotiations through the parties, something we are pursuing at this time, and not at the United Nations,” he stressed.

Miller, however, did not explicitly say that Washington would veto such a bid if it reaches the UN Security Council.

He also said that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had so far tried his best to help establish what he called “security guarantees” for the Israeli regime as part of the groundwork for a Palestinian state.

Miller’s comments came just a day after Robert Wood, the US deputy ambassador to the UN, vowed to block a new attempt by the Palestinians for full membership in the UN.

Supporters of the Palestinians’ request for full membership in the United Nations asked the UN Security Council on Tuesday to revive their application for admission submitted in 2011.

The fresh bid, addressed to the UNSC president, included the names of 140 countries that have recognized a Palestinian state, including members of the 22-nation Arab League, the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the 120-member Nonaligned Movement.

“Our position has not changed,” Wood stressed, reiterating Washington’s stance which claims that a full UN membership for Palestine should follow a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Back in September 2011, President Mahmoud Abbas failed in his attempt to make Palestine the 194th member of the UN as he could not get the required support of nine of the UNSC’s 15 members.

Even if he had managed to get the required support at the time, the US had promised to veto any UNSC resolution endorsing Palestinian membership.

However, Palestinians succeeded by more than a two-thirds majority in having their status raised from a UN observer to a non-member observer state in November 2012.

Under longstanding legislation by Congress, the US is required to sever financial support for UN agencies that give full membership to a Palestinian state.

Wood stressed that once the UN agrees to make Palestine its new member, “funding would be cut off to the UN system, so we’re bound by US law.”

“Our hope is that they don’t pursue that, but that’s up to them,” he added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for decades opposed the Palestinian statehood.

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

US, UK Did Not Discuss Russian UNSC Statement on Attack on Iranian Consulate – Envoy

Sputnik – 03.04.2024

UNITED NATIONS – The United States and the United Kingdom refused to discuss a draft statement of the UN Security Council proposed by Russia on Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said on Wednesday.

“Following the results of the Security Council meeting on April 2 on the Israeli attack on the consular department of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Russia prepared a draft Security Council Statement for the press with a standard text for such cases. However, the United States and Great Britain did not even want to discuss it, citing the fact that during the meeting there was no unity in assessments of what happened,” Polyansky wrote on his Telegram page.

He recalled that at that time only these two delegations, together with the French, did not condemn this obvious violation of international law, “but engaged in a verbal balancing act, from which it could be concluded that Iran itself is to blame for everything.”

“This is the best illustration of the double standards of the Western “troika” and it’s real, and not declarative, attitude towards law and order in the international context,” the diplomat emphasized.

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Samantha Power and the Power of a Word

BY DIANA JOHNSTONE • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 3, 2024

Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

NATO’s air attacks on the Balkan nation were the practical application of a new post-Cold War doctrine. To succeed, this doctrine relied on Western media to report on crisis areas with the appropriate mixture of exaggerations, omissions and outright lies to justify NATO’s virtuous interventions. The military industrial complex could breathe easy and a new generation of journalists began successful careers eagerly spinning their reports to serve the new humanitarian war ideology.

None was more successful than Dublin-born Samantha Power, whose novice reports from Bosnia in the mid-1990s provided the basis for her 2002 book on “genocide” which “quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine.” She has gone on from one top governmental post to another, a Washington star, urging the United States to intervene on moral grounds.

Samantha Power owes her remarkable success to her talent as a writer, her ambition, her striking presence, but not least to the man at the origins of the whole humanitarian war policy.

That was none other than Morton Isaac Abramowitz, a highly influential member of the foreign policy establishment and the main inventor of what would become the “R2P” (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine. The crucial policy contribution of Abramowitz is explained at the start of my 2002 book, Fools’ Crusade, as follows:[1]

As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of U.S. “ideals”.

Theory and Practice

At the Carnegie Endowment in 1992, Abramowitz published the theory of the new U.S. “humanitarian intervention” policy as Self-Determination in the New World Order.

“The vision of a ‘new world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower – the United States – in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.”

That sounds very nice. But put into practice, “collective resistance” means NATO, and “all people are treated justly” depends on Washington’s preferences. The new rules-based order was not to be confused with traditional international law, based on national sovereignty. Globalization was making national sovereignty outdated (except for the United States). “Ideals” make rules more flexible.

The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, “groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination”. […] In the future, the authors announced, “humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable”. The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene.

Abramowitz subsequently helped put his theory into practice in crumbling Yugoslavia. He was the eminence grise behind U.S. diplomats, steering the events leading to the “Kosovo war” that split the province of Kosovo off from Serbia. He was advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the imitation “peace negotiations” staged at Rambouillet to provide an excuse for the bombing of Serbia. The moderate Albanian Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova was replaced by the armed gangster, Hashim Thaci. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set terms no Serbian leader could accept, demanding the right to station NATO troops over the entire country, with full impunity. The Serb side was then blamed for the failure, and NATO began to bomb on March 24, 1999.

Samantha Steals her Way into Bosnia

Back in 1992, fresh out of Yale, 22-year-old Samantha Power was given a position as intern in the office of Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. As a proofreader, she quickly absorbed the new official doctrine. At that time, her boss was obsessed with the conflicts in Bosnia as implicating the future of NATO. Determined to get to Bosnia where the action was, Samantha stole stationery from the neighboring office of Foreign Policy magazine and forged a letter from the editor to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide her, as Foreign Policy’s “Balkan correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”[2]

From that time on, her work functioned precisely to advance the new “humanitarian intervention” policy of her mentor, Morton Abramowitz. She recalls that his influence helped her get increasingly important assignments – most crucially, writing about the Srebrenica massacre for The Washington Post.

With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.

The Western press corps based in Sarajevo tended to become emotionally involved with the Muslim side which was its principal news source. Missing from their dispatches were reports on Muslim massacres of Serbs villages or on the well-armed Islamic fighters who joined the Muslim side from Afghanistan and Arab countries, some of them settling permanently in Bosnia.

When Bosnian Serb forces captured the Muslim base at Srebrenica in July 1995, they evacuated women, children and the aged to safety, while men fled, fearing retaliation. Many were killed in unclear circumstances.

Without reference to such context, Western media focused on reports of a massacre of 8,000 male prisoners as a unique event which branded the Serbs as the guilty party in the three-sided civil war. With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.

Calling Srebrenica “genocide” provided the argument for NATO bombing: if Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia, it implied that Serbs were genocidal and risked committing genocide in Kosovo unless NATO intervened. This theory was supported by wildly inaccurate accusations voiced by leading Western politicians during the bombing campaign.

That was the story that was sold to the public by politicians and the media. From the start, the Serb majority in Yugoslavia had been portrayed as invaders in their own country, with everyone else as victims. Thus was destroyed the last semi-socialist, nonaligned country in Europe.

The Kosovo war indeed combined U.S. “interests and ideals”. The ideals were preventing a genocide that never would have taken place (and also, incidentally, preventing a negotiation that could have settled the whole conflict as well). The interests included the immediate construction by the Americans of a giant U.S. military base on the territory of Kosovo, once Serbian forces were obliged to leave.

Genocide and R2P

Samantha Power’s 2002 book was subtitled “America in the Age of Genocide”. To speak of the present as an “age of genocide” is wildly melodramatic, but the purpose is to place virtuous America in the center of drastic moral demands. America must save the world from its genocidal self. “Genocide” was thereby promoted as the most potent pretext for U.S. military intervention – precisely by deploring its absence, both in Bosnia and more convincingly, in Rwanda. The Clinton administration was certainly not going to intervene in Rwanda, because the bloody chaos was in fact favoring the conquest of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and his army, which had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Kagame was a favored client of the United States. There was no reason for Washington to interfere with Kagame’s victory.

But the “failure to stop genocide” was an appeal to the liberal conscience to intervene later on, whenever the U.S. was in need a powerful argument to get rid of a someone it wanted to get rid of. Moammer Gaddafi had been on the U.S.-UK hit list for decades, but had made concessions to gain reconciliation. But when Gaddafi’s usual fundamentalist Islamic opponents in Tripoli used the 2011 “Arab spring” to raise protests, the “threat of genocide” alarm was raised on their behalf. In Washington, action to stop Gaddafi from “committing genocide” was urged by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, while Bernard Henri Lévy raised the alarm in Paris. NATO rose to the challenge, destroyed the most economically successful country on the African continent and murdered its leader, creating a flood of refugees to Europe and other disasters. Most of the liberal left cheered.

Today it is widely recognized that the Irak war was based on deceit and ended in disaster. Other U.S. wars are mostly conceded to have been unfortunate mistakes. There are doubts about Libya, due mainly to the refugee flow. But the destruction of Yugoslavia, and in particular the 1999 “Kosovo war”, is still widely accepted in the West as what it was arranged to appear: NATO’s generous humanitarian intervention to prevent “genocide” by racist Serbs against the oppressed Albanian minority.

The distortions of the Bosnia conflict and the Kosovo war were precisely the practical application of the Abramowitz policy: promote minority rebellions to break down national sovereignty and change governments the U.S. doesn’t like, while supplying NATO with a new geographically unlimited mission of “humanitarian intervention”. Yugoslavia was the starting point of the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order, using the idealistic pretexts set out by Abramowitz. Young Samantha Power, who was very smart, got the point and ambitiously cheated her way into a supporting role as reporter in the Bosnia spectacle, which she eventually transformed into an astonishingly successful career.

I was in Kosovo on my own in months prior to the NATO bombardment and saw quite clearly that in that small province, the Serbs were a frightened minority while Albanians were already tasting their future triumph. There was absolutely no danger of a Serbian “genocide” of Albanians. But Western editors kept sending in ignorant young aspiring journalists, on the lookout for some “Serb atrocity” that could advance their budding career. Editors rejected any report that went in a different direction. It was at that time just plain impossible to publish an unbiased report. I know from experience.

Above all, breaking up Yugoslavia was an exercise in subsequent efforts to undermine the Russian Federation, by inciting the Federation’s ethnic minorities against the Russians. Ukraine was the crucial battering ram. I always used to think of Ukraine when studying the conflicts in the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia, as both words have the same root (border land) and suffered from similar conflicts, notably in World War II. Western powers had revived the Nazi-supported Croatian nationalism against the Serbs to break up Yugoslavia. They would revive much more virulent Nazi-supported Ukrainian nationalism against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, in an effort to weaken and eventually even break up the Russian Federation.

And for the United States, the humanitarian “ideals” of supporting minorities would be compensated by the major strategic “interest” of eventually gaining control of Crimea, and with it, Russia’s main naval base in Sebastopol. Putin did what any Russian leader not brain-dead would have done: he headed off this disaster by mobilizing the Russian inhabitants of Crimea to vote to return to Russia, which they had never chosen to leave. This obvious act of self-determination is denounced in the West as an invasion.

The Ideological Backlash

Unfortunately, the blatantly tragic misuse of the “humanitarian intervention” or R2P doctrine in Libya has not managed to achieve its discredit. It is threatened now by the danger that it is changing sides in the very global conflicts it has stimulated.

The referendum in Crimea was a democratic measure of self-determination that fit the Abramowitz standards. The Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in 2022 was partially motivated by the sort of consideration featured in the Abramowitz doctrine: defense of the population of Donbas, under attack from an ultranationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, Western governments and media have simply totally ignored any Russia appeal to the ideals of human rights and self-determination, which they consider their own private property as self-declared unique “democracies”. Russia is classed as an “autocracy” whose interests must be malevolent and thus don’t count.

A greater threat to the West’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. Most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full Western backing, committing Genocide – the real thing this time, out in the open, blatant and unrelenting.

The NATO war machine may have to conjure up a new set of moralizing pretexts for its aggressions.

Notes

[1] See Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, pp 9-10; Monthly Review 2003

[2] Here, with William Burns, Samantha Power discusses her new autobiography The Education of an Idealist and recalls her short term working for Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/13/samantha-power-on-education-of-idealist-event-7178

April 3, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Black – Jewish Delusion

Nation Of Islam Research Group | March 2024

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”

—The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

When confronted by journalist Vicki Dillard on his stance on several Black issues—including his support for Israel’s genocidal obliteration of Gaza, Israel’s targeting of Black youth, and Israel’s training of police in America—presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ducked, dodged and resorted to the standard political pablum that every politician knows to pitch to the Black electorate. But when this Caucasian Irish Catholic lectured Blacks on how grateful they should be to white Jews for ALL they have done for them, he brought arrogance and ignorance to new levels. A verbatim transcript of his remarks follows:

“I would point out to you that during the civil rights movement that the Jews in this country and particularly the leadership of the Jews took a, um, were at the forefront of that movement and were embraced by Martin Luther King, were embraced by the other leaders of the movement. Three Jewish boys—Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney—were killed in Mississippi. They died or that Black Americans could—first the civil rights movement. Many, many other Jews took, took great risk and suffered because of their sacrifices for this civil rights movement…”

And with this fairytale-filled paragraph Kennedy believes he can dismiss the immense record of Jewish slave trading and the slavery-derived profits that made America the “promised land” for Jews, who, as a direct result of the slave trade, slavery, and sharecropping, achieved unprecedented wealth and prosperity. It is impossible to tell exactly what Kennedy is referring to with his disjointed word salad, but what is clear is that Kennedy believes he can milk an alleged civil rights legacy left to him by his father and uncle, Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy respectively. His double-barreled gambit is that (1) he can “embrace” the Black vote with a nostalgic civil righteousness; and (2) he can keep Jewish money flowing into his current presidential campaign by repeating an imaginary “civil rights” history Jews love to hear over and over and over again.

Indeed, Kennedy referred to the civil rights “movement” five times in that single paragraph. But the hard truth is that as attorney general, RFK, Jr.’s father ordered the FBI’s 24-hour surveillance and wiretapping of the movement’s leader—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King—as part of his Justice Department’s notorious COINTELPRO operation that terrorized and murdered Black leaders and organizations. The harassment suffered by Dr. King, his family, and his movement has been well-covered elsewhere (here and here), but it included sending a menacing letter to Rev. King (see graphic) calling him “an evil, abnormal beast” and advising him to kill himself. Ultimately his assassination in 1968 was most likely carried out by these same agents of the U.S. government. When confronted recently on the role his father played in this targeting of Rev. King, RFK, Jr. exonerates his elders: “There was good reason for them doing that at the time… They knew that Hoover was out to ruin King,” Kennedy acknowledges. Blacks would be hard pressed to find a “good reason” for anyone to unleash J. Edgar Hoover on Black America’s most revered religious leader.

The Kennedys’ Alleged Civil Rights Legacy

As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy—RFK,Jr.’s father— developed a reputation as an advocate of civil rights in large part based on an incident that occurred in Georgia in 1960 involving the Rev. Martin Luther King, whom the FBI had been monitoring for five years. Dr. King was leading more than 200 activists in a campaign of sit-ins at 11 department stores in Atlanta when he was among the 51 Blacks arrested, but King was sentenced to four months of hard labor at a Georgia penitentiary.

When the incident hit the national news, the public outcry and pressure on “Bobby” to act was intense and so Kennedy called the sentencing judge and appealed to him to allow King to be released on bond and to appeal the conviction. Thus, Robert Kennedy became known as a “protector” of Black rights, if not a crusader. But the Atlanta episode exposed the underbelly of the Black–Jewish relationship and challenges the notion that the “Jewish leaders,” as Kennedy so smugly claimed, “um, were at the forefront of that movement.”

The arrest of Dr. King and the many demonstrators with him occurred at Rich’s Department Store, the largest department store in the South—at the demand of its Jewish owner Richard Rich (in photo). Rich was an honored member of his Atlanta synagogue and a president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and he was even voted Georgia’s Citizen of the Year by the Association of County Commissioners. Certainly he would be considered a Jewish leader, and he certainly was at the “forefront” of the civil rights movement—but on the opposite side of Black justice.

Rich (who changed his name from Rosenheim) operated the largest segregated business in Atlanta. He paid Blacks less than whites, had separate cafeterias and restrooms, and even held separate Christmas parties. Despite having one of the largest Black customer bases, he denied Blacks the right to work in any capacity other than in the kitchen, and he put those Black women in “Aunt Jemima costumes” to serve the all-white diners. All of this is by anyone’s definition the very opposite of “civil rights.”

This is significant because Jews and their supporters—like RFK, Jr.—demand that Blacks only consider the works of the “helpful” Jews like Goodman and Schwerner, but ignore the much larger role of those powerful Jim Crow Jews like Richard Rich who created the very conditions that necessitated the civil rights movement.

According to the book We Are Not Afraid: The Story Of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, after the first anti-segregation protest at his store a defiant Richard Rich “warned them angrily that integration would not be tolerated at Rich’s and that if they attempted a sit-in in his store again he would have them all arrested.”

Rich said he based his racism on “local customs,” but the other Jim Crow stores indicated that their racist policies were based on Rich’s, because his store was by far the largest. It was on the orders of the racist Richard Rich that Martin Luther King was handcuffed and jailed. When the publicity threatened to affect Rich’s profits, he tried to escape responsibility and declined to prosecute—but not because King and fellow protestors were right, but because, according to Rich and his attorney Morris Abram, “we didn’t want to make martyrs out of them and King.”

Rich was the most important Jew in Atlanta, and he was following in the footsteps of another leading Jew of a previous generation. In 1906, Oscar Pappenheimer was the most influential Jewish businessman in Atlanta. He offered this “practical suggestion” for Black civil rights in the Atlanta Constitution:

“I propose the registration of negroes in the southern states 14 years of age and more….Each person so registered should possess… a certificate… in which should be entered description, date and place of birth and, at each registration, record of abode, employment, conduct and reference….Let others decide whether it be legal to pass laws bearing on this subject with reference to the colored race only…”

Pappenheimer’s Atlanta proposal was nearly identical to that which Adolf Hitler enforced against Jews in Nazi Germany 30 years later.

So far, where do these Jews fit in RFK, Jr.’s civil rights fairytale?

RFK’s “Three Jewish boys”

In a truly embarrassing gaffe Kennedy claimed that “Three Jewish boys—Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney—were killed in Mississippi.” This, of course, would be news to James Chaney (left) and his family, who were not only Black but members of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Meridian, Mississippi. Nonetheless, the three martyrs cannot be forgotten for the ultimate sacrifice they made in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 for the cause of Black human rights. Nor can we allow falsehoods and propaganda to be cynically promoted in their names. Kennedy is the latest in a long line of mostly Jewish deceivers who use the names and tragic stories of the two “Jewish boys” to very subtly conceal the long and very uncivil history of Jews in the apartheid South.

By far Mississippi had more lynchings and racist violence than any other state. It is where at least 581 human beings met a horrifying, trial-free demise, and it is where three outright massacres of Blacks occurred in Vicksburg, Clinton, and Macon. After slavery Blacks made great strides in education and began building independent communities, so whites who saw no other role for Blacks but as plantation laborers increased their anti-Black violence and repression. In 1890, Mississippi legislators passed a state constitution specifically to “eliminate the nigger from politics.”

On the other hand, the two Jewish New Yorkers—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were coming to a state that had loved and embraced Jews—and vice versa—for centuries. It is a secret reality that the most distinguished Jewish historians, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Marcus and Dr. Abraham Peck, proudly expressed in the book Jews in Early Mississippi:

“Where else would members of the Christian community donate monies to help build the local synagogue? Where else could Jews be members of the city council or even become mayor? Where else, as in the case of Leopold Marks, could a town be named after a Jew? And when it came time to answer the call to arms [serving the pro-slavery Confederate army] the Jews of Mississippi went with enthusiasm.”

Drs. Marcus and Peck write that these Jews “had love of and devotion to the state of Mississippi.” With the same evident pride the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life lists 23 Jewish mayors who reigned in cities and towns all over Mississippi. And note that these Jews were considered by their overwhelmingly white gentile voters to be the very best people to lead their slavery-based, apartheid-practicing, drop-of-a-hat lynching, black voter-discriminating towns and cities. As the Institute says, “For the most part, Jews have enjoyed remarkable acceptance in Mississippi.”

Here is a screenshot of their listing:

Jewish leaders, like Natchez, Mississippi, merchant Jacob Soria, would not have “embraced” Martin Luther King, as RFK, Jr. surmises, but would have sold him and his fellow protesters at Rich’s along with the 32 Black men, women and children he advertised for sale at auction in 1839.

Jewish hate groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center exploit the triple murder tragedy to advance the fallacy that the fates of Blacks and Jews in America were somehow intertwined—that their histories are one and the same. And from this hypocritical trick these satanic shysters, claiming to be “friends and allies” of Blacks, have been able to maneuver themselves into organizational control over the Black “civil rights” leadership.

Typical of this Tricknology is the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who in 2023 stood in front of Dr. King’s children and other Black leaders and pompously “counseled” them on “the history of how Blacks and Jews struggled alongside one another…” He said, “They don’t remember the sacrifices of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman…” But it is Greenblatt who doesn’t remember the sacrifices Blacks made for Jewish wealth in Mississippi and elsewhere in America.

To wit, B’nai B’rith is the parent organization of Greenblatt’s ADL. In deep, dark, Ku Klux Klan-saturated Mississippi the B’nai B’rith of Vicksburg held a dance (left photo below) in 1917 at the dedication of their palatial new “BB club.”

Their new building—opulent even by today’s standards—was designed in Spanish Renaissance architecture and constructed with Georgian marble and fine mahogany with ivory inlay. The lower level had a swimming pool, massage tables, locker rooms, a servant’s entrance, a butler’s pantry; and the upper floors had meeting rooms with pivoted windows, a walnut-encased billiard room, high-relief plaster work accented with electric lighting, a fine dining room, a lounge area in the mezzanine leading to the balcony overlooking the chandeliered ballroom, a roof garden, a gallery with a tiled floor and stone balustrade, a kitchen with a gas range, and a library.

This is how Mississippi Jews were faring 47 years before Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner arrived to help Blacks achieve voting rights! At that same moment, Mississippi Blacks “were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty,” trapped in oppressive “contracts” with wealthy landowners like H. Hiller, a Jewish merchant who owned 400 of these sharecropper farms.

The pictured “negro shack” on white-owned land was the lot of the vast majority of Mississippi Blacks, whilst Jews flaunted the wealth they acquired in the most obscene way, in the most violently racist state in America.

Today we must ask why on earth would these Jews want to jeopardize, let alone change, this golden reality by participating in any “civil rights” movement? Logically, they would not, and indeed they did not.

Nonetheless, by all accounts both Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman came to Mississippi as dedicated individuals committed to racial justice, and, tellingly, not representing any synagogue or Jewish organization. And though their memories are cynically exploited—as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just did—for political benefit, a very thoughtful Andrew Goodman offered his community some sage advice about a Black organization that “Jewish leaders” like Greenblatt and his predecessor Abraham Foxman were dedicated to destroying:

“… it is true that the white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro race…. The historical contempt that the white race held for the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people. The current neglect of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs. The Black Muslims should constitute a warning to our societya warning that must be heeded if we are to preserve the society. The road to freedom must be uphill, even if it is arduous and frustrating. A people must have dignity and identity. If they can’t do it peacefully, they will do it defensively.”

According to the aforementioned book We Are Not Afraid, Goodman’s 31-page thesis “The Black Muslims: A Phenomenon of Negro Reaction,” completed just days before he was murdered, “was a young man’s cri de coeur, a pronouncement of beliefs, and an explanation for the action he was about to take.” Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Jonathan Greenblatt must then come to grips with a very inconvenient racial reality—that Andrew Goodman, the man they hold up as a sacred symbol of the Black–Jewish relationship, made his fateful decision to aid the Black struggle in Mississippi as a consequence of the Teachings of the Nation of Islam.


For more on this topic see the Nation of Islam book series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. Download the free guide by clicking here.

To purchase the series click here.

March 31, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | 3 Comments

Russian athletes ‘not welcome’ at Olympics – Paris mayor

Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, Kiev, Ukraine, March 28, 2024 © Getty Images / Aleksandr Gusev/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
RT | March 31, 2024

The mayor of Paris has reiterated her proposal that Russian and Belarusian contestants stay away from this summer’s Olympic Games in the French capital, despite them being officially allowed to compete as neutrals.

“I want to tell the Russian and Belarusian athletes that they are not welcome in Paris,” Anne Hidalgo told Ukrainian athletes at a training center in Kiev on Thursday, while on a visit to Ukraine.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) initially pushed for a complete ban on competitors from Russia and Belarus after the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. However, last December the IOC ruled that a limited number of people from the two countries could participate as AINs (individual neutral athletes).

Hidalgo told Reuters earlier this month that she would prefer for Russian and Belarusian contestants not to come at all. “We cannot act as if [the Russian military operation in Ukraine] did not exist,” she told Reuters.

When asked about Israel’s Olympic participation – in the context of the Gaza war, raging since the Hamas attack on October 7 – Hidalgo insisted there was no comparison to be made.

Sanctioning Israeli athletes is “out of the question because Israel is a democracy,” she stated.

Russia has slammed the IOC’s difference in approach to Israeli and Russian contestants. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused the Switzerland-based body of “political activism” and called its approach self-discrediting.

The maximum numbers of Russian and Belarusian athletes that can qualify for the upcoming games are 55 and 28, respectively. The IOC has noted that the teams are unlikely to actually meet the quota, with some 36 Russian and 22 Belarusian athletes expected to make it to the games, according to IOC director James Macleod.

Participants from the two nations can only compete in individual events, and not team sports, under a neutral flag, and are barred from the Olympic opening ceremony.

Commenting on the restrictions faced by Russian and Belarusian competitors, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move “destroys Olympic ideals and discriminates against the interests of Olympians.” Such restrictions run “absolutely contrary to the entire ideology of the Olympic movement,” he insisted.

March 31, 2024 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Imagine If Russia or China Did the Things Israel Is Doing in Gaza

By Caitlin Johnstone | March 28, 2024

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was bombing and starving a walled-in population of two million, half of them children. Seriously, imagine it. Imagine the rage and vitriol. Imagine the nonstop media coverage.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, US media coverage of that war exceeded the media coverage of all US wars in the previous three decades. If Russia were deliberately and systematically exterminating civilians in Ukraine or anywhere else, the western media coverage of those war crimes would be many times more.

It’s almost cliché at this point to say “imagine if Russia or China did this”, but such comparisons are important for retaining a sense of perspective on just how evil the western political-media class is being about Gaza right now. We’re seeing articles come out in the mass media about starvation in Gaza which never once even mention the word “Israel”. Do you think that would be happening if this were being perpetrated by a government which defies the western empire? Of course not.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.

We’d be living in a different political and media landscape. If Russia or China was doing what Israel is doing, entire presidential campaigns would have been built around who would oppose it most aggressively. Every sanction and embargo in the book would have been slammed upon the perpetrating government. The western press would be falling all over themselves to expose every atrocity and every lie and blaring those expositions as feature stories on every platform for months, and showering one another with awards for doing so.

Instead we get this. Government officials babbling nonstop about Israel’s “right” to “defend itself” and how this would all be over if Hamas didn’t keep fighting, while showering Israel with weapons to help it continue its atrocities. The mass media churning out a constant deluge of passive-language “Gazans are having trouble finding food for some reason” headlines and continuous reminders that this is all happening because of October 7, while repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda like it’s gospel truth. All viable US presidential candidates vowing their unconditional support for Israel while occasionally impotently finger-wagging at this or that aspect of Israel’s atrocities to avoid looking like complete psychopaths.

That contrast between how the western political-media class is acting toward the Gaza genocide and how we all know they’d be acting if an unaligned government was doing something similar is exactly why the US-centralized empire cannot be permitted to rule our world anymore. It pretends to stand for peace, justice, freedom and democracy, but in reality it just inflicts nonstop death and suffering upon human beings around the world and covers it up with propaganda spin from its servile mainstream press. It purports to uphold the “rules-based international order”, but all that means in practice is that it upholds an international order in which the US empire makes up the rules as it goes along and changes them as it pleases.

Humanity cannot allow itself to be abused and tyrannized by this murderous, hypocritical globe-spanning power structure any longer. A better world is possible, but we’re going to have to find a way to pry the talons of these monsters off the steering wheel first.

March 29, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | 2 Comments

Spain denounces “indiscriminate massacres” in Gaza but exports weapons to Ukraine

By Ahmed Adel | March 25, 2024

Spain will acquire combat-tested Israeli military material worth €207 million at a time when the Iberian country also promised to recognise a Palestinian state and cut military exports to Israel. Decisionmakers in Madrid justify cutting exports to Israel due to “massacres” against Palestinians, but at the same time, export weapons to Ukraine, contributing to the massacre of civilians in eastern Europe.

The Ministry of Defence of Spain, through the General Subdirectorate of Acquisitions of Weapons and Materials, has initiated the purchase of Israeli-made weapons by awarding a contract to Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, one of the three largest military-industrial companies in Israel, to equip the Air Force’s Eurofighter Litening V fleet. In the award announcement, Rafael was claimed to be “the only one technically qualified to develop the project from a technical point of view” since it included the use of laser-guided precision munitions.

It also happens that the Litening V laser pods by Rafael have been used for months in Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza, which has caused more than 31,000 deaths to date. Like almost all the war material that Israel usually exports, the Litening V laser pods are weapon support equipment whose manufacturers boast of their “combat proven” status due to their effectiveness against the Palestinians.

Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister José Manuel Albares announced on more than one occasion the “total embargo” on the export of weapons to Israel. The contract awarded to Rafael obviously concerns an import and not an export, and, in this manner, Spain virtue signals against Israel whilst still benefiting from its military-industrial complex.

However, according to a study by the Delàs Center for Peace Studies, Israeli weapons imports carry a greater severity than military exports to Tel Aviv. In effect, the purchase of military material from Israel strengthens the country’s military and security model and, more importantly, contributes to subduing the Palestinians, which Israel makes economically viable with the sale of its combat-tested military products.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez says he is going to recognise Palestine as an independent State and that he considers what Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip “an indiscriminate massacre,” but then he continues to buy weapons from Israel. Therefore, it is not feasible to grant any type of credibility to the statements of the members of the Spanish government.

Last November, Sánchez vowed to prioritise the recognition of Palestinian statehood as its main foreign policy priority. However, when speaking after a summit in Brussels on March 22, he suggested to reporters that Spain would coordinate with other EU countries instead of unilaterally making the decision to recognise Palestinian statehood.

“We want to take this step united. It’s a decisive step in order to lay the foundations of a lasting peace,” he said in an evident u-turn, adding that the EU should “carefully calibrate” the right moment to take the step.

At the same time, before the Congressional Defence Commission, the Secretary of State for Commerce reported on the list of shipments of military material to Ukraine between March 2022 and February 2024. The amount supplied is equivalent to €190 million. These are mainly drones, grenade launchers, anti-tank mines, artillery ammunition, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, tracked vehicles, night vision equipment, and 10 Leopard 2A4 tanks.

But this list does not take into account a new batch of Leopard 2A4 battle tanks since the Interministerial Board for Trade and Control of Defence Material and Dual-Use Technologies (JIMDDU) authorised the shipment of another 19 of these armoured vehicles to Kiev once they are repaired and conditioned at the facilities of the Santa Bárbara Sistemas factory in the province of Seville.

Ten of the 19 tanks have already been transferred from the Army base in Casetas near Zaragoza, where they were stored. According to military sources cited by El Heraldo de Aragón, the plan is to send them to Ukraine at the end of June. To this end, the parts and spare parts necessary for its reconstruction must first be found, and when the entire process is completed, Spain will have sent a total of 29 Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

Nonetheless, shipping will be complicated since these vehicles are in even worse condition than the dozen reconditioned Leopards already shipped in 2023. Spain is sending such poor-conditioned vehicles to Kiev to increase its rearmament because the old stock must be disposed of before buying new weapons and equipment.

In this context, Spain justifies not exporting weapons to Israel because of the “indiscriminate massacre” of Palestinians but exports weapons to Ukraine, which contributes to the massacre of people in Ukraine and Russia’s newly liberated territories. Compounding the contradiction is then the fact that Spain imports military equipment from Israel while refusing to export to the Jewish state and promising to recognise a Palestinian state.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

March 25, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

South Africa says Israel’s attack on Gaza is undermining the ICJ

MEMO | March 20, 2024

South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor accused Israel yesterday of setting a precedent in defying the decisions of the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the UN also known as the World Court, and insisted again that Gaza is witnessing a deliberate “starvation” campaign.

South Africa took Israel to the ICJ in December, accusing it of committing genocide in the military offensive it has been waging since October. Pretoria’s move angered Israel and was condemned by the US.

Pandor pointed out that Israel has defied the ICJ’s January ruling which ordered the occupation state to do everything in its power to prevent genocide. Earlier this month, Pretoria asked the ICJ to impose “provisional measures” to put an end to the “widespread starvation” occurring as a result of Israel’s military attack in Gaza.

Pandor made her comments at a symposium at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace during a visit to Washington DC. “The provisional measures have been entirely ignored by Israel,” she warned. “We’re seeing mass starvation now and famine before our very eyes. I think we, as humanity, need to look at ourselves in horror and dismay and to be really worried that we have set an example.”

The minister noted that Israel’s actions may be interpreted by other nations that they have a licence to do what they want and will not be stopped.

She added that South Africa’s post-apartheid democracy, in going through international institutions on this issue, was “merely practicing what is preached to us every day” by the West. “The ICJ has not been respected. And the day that an African disrespects [the court] I hope we don’t go to that leader and say ‘Listen, you’re out of bounds; because you’re an African, we expect you to obey’.”

South Africa once again petitioned the court in The Hague to order measures for Israel to stop “widespread starvation” due to its attack on Gaza.

Israel denounced the petition, describing it arrogantly as “morally repugnant” and noting initiatives it is taking, including suspending aggression for humanitarian reasons.

A food security assessment backed by the UN has found that Gaza faces imminent famine, with about 1.1 million people, or nearly half of the population, suffering from “catastrophic” hunger.

March 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment