Kissinger & the Americas: How the US Built Order ‘on The Ashes of Genocide’
Sputnik – December 3, 2023
“A huge loss.” “A cherished friend and mentor.” “His appointment said as much about his greatness as it did America’s greatness.” Tributes are pouring in after the death of Henry Kissinger, America’s best known diplomat.
Kissinger died Wednesday at the age of 100 at his home in Kent, Connecticut. Having served as US Secretary of State for eight years under the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, Kissinger strove to maintain global US dominance during a time when it was in doubt. His influence molded America’s foreign policy for years to come.
But not everyone celebrates the empire built by the highly consequential statesman.
An Argentine speaks with Sputnik about how her family was affected.
Guillermo Montes (right) pictured next to his brother (left), the father of Agustina Montes © Courtesy of Agustina Montes
“What it really is, is a kingdom built on the ashes of genocide,” said Agustina Montes in an interview with Sputnik.
Montes is an Argentine citizen now living in New Zealand. Inflation neared 150% in her home country last month amidst an economic crisis that’s wreaked havoc on Argentina for half a decade.
Compounding the financial disruption, Montes sees an Argentine society still torn apart by its recent history.
“Genocide denialism is at an all time high,” laments the 37-year-old. “With the elections in Argentina, it’s more pressing than ever. Politicians make barely veiled threats about military uprising. We know what that can mean.”
Argentina’s vice president-elect Victoria Villarruel has downplayed the brutality of the South American country’s seven-year military dictatorship. Villarruel made headlines last month when she criticized UNESCO’s decision to declare Buenos Aires’ ESMA Navy school a World Heritage site. Tens of thousands passed through the facility before being tortured or killed.
Among them were Montes’ uncles, Miguel and Guillermo.
Reorganization
The “National Reorganization Process” was the benign name for the regime that seized power in 1976.
Argentines knew it was a military dictatorship. They’d seen several throughout the 20th century. If the generals sought to “reorganize” Argentine society it was through the barrel of a gun.
Amid the violence, one figure in Washington provided Argentina’s new rulers with the legitimacy they craved.
“We have followed events in Argentina closely,” said then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to the country’s new foreign minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti. “We wish the new government well. We wish it will succeed. We will do what we can to help it succeed.”
“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”
Photograph taken on April 29, 1975 in Washington of the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. © AFP 2023 / GENE FORTE
For the junta, the things that had to be done were kidnapping, torture, and murder. The regime faced pressure from armed resistance groups. Some of them aligned with charismatic former President Juan Perón. Many were socialists. The regime was intent on snuffing them out.
“I have a ‘desaparecido’ on each side of my family,” Montes told Sputnik, using the Spanish term for people who vanished during that period. “My dad’s brother Guillermo and my mum’s brother Miguel Angel.”
“Miguel Angel Fiorito – Milan to his family – was taken on July 12th, 1976, so pretty early in the dictatorship. My uncle was 21 and very idealistic, I’ve been told he was very funny and warm. He worked in the villas, or slums, and had a very keen sense of social justice.”
“Guillermo Montes was my dad’s brother. He was a bit older when he was taken, about 27 or 28. He made it to 1977. He was a massive man, called ‘the Yeti’ by his companions. He went to work one day and never came back.”
Left: Miguel Angel Fiorito, Right: Guillermo Montes © Courtesy of Agustina Montes
In the repressive fog of the time, “disappeared” became the euphemism for those who fell prey to the reorganization. The word was terrifying as much because of the uncertainty it implied as anything else. Families rarely received closure. “The army never spoke,” says Montes.
Parents throughout the country sought answers. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo was formed when a group of mothers came together in Buenos Aires’ central square. The group became known for their unique form of silent protest, wearing white headscarves symbolizing the cloth diapers of their disappeared children.
Montes said her grandmother knew of the Madres, but “she lacked the political beliefs they had. She loved her son but didn’t believe that what he had done was right.”
Politics provoked sharp divisions in Argentine society in those days.
“My mum’s family was pretty pro-dictatorship up until that point [that Miguel was kidnapped],” says Montes, “mostly because they were anti-Perón.” Montes explained that Miguel began Argentina’s required military service in March of 1976.
“He was also a part of the Montoneros, one of the leftist anti-dictatorship movements. Growing up in the ‘90s, where the rhetoric was that everyone involved in the guerrilla was a terrorist, I had a deep sense of shame about this. We did not discuss politics in my house.”
“My uncles were very present ghosts but we would not talk about them.”
The Chilean Method
The divisions within Montes’ family mirrored those throughout Latin America. Cuba’s revolution sent shockwaves across the region with the reverberations felt at the highest echelons of American power. They only intensified as grassroots movements approached political legitimacy.
Washington’s worst fears were realized in 1970, when the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile.
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” said Kissinger during a closed-door meeting with Nixon. “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
The CIA immediately went to work destabilizing Allende’s democratic government, infiltrating Chile’s trade unions, provoking strikes, fomenting opposition within the military. Within three years Allende was overthrown in a military coup backed by Kissinger. The country’s new leader General Augusto Pinochet declared war on the left, and Santiago’s national soccer stadium was filled with dissidents waiting to be tortured, jailed, and killed.
Nixon’s embrace of Pinochet was justified under the Cold War banner of anticommunism. Socialists, democratically-elected as they may be, were also simply bad for business as it turned out. Concerned about their investments in Chile, the US-based International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation funneled millions of dollars toward forces plotting Allende’s downfall.
Three years later, Argentina’s military government sought a similar approach to repress opposition. “Their theory is that they can use the Chilean method,” aide Harry Shlaudeman informed Kissinger in 1976. “That is, to terrorize the opposition – even killing priests and nuns and others.”
By then an axis of dictatorship stretched across the Southern Cone, with American-backed juntas in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and now Argentina. Under the coordination of the US Central Intelligence Agency the governments coordinated their efforts in a campaign of state terror known as Operation Condor.
“I don’t remember the first time I heard or read his name,” said Montes of Kissinger. “My family didn’t speak about this, and back then this whole period of Argentine history was completely erased from history classes at school.”
“I think of his name in proximity to the names of our dictators: Videla, Massera. Kissinger, the CIA, ‘Plan Condor.’ Like shadowy figures behind it all.”
Montes is likewise unsure about what drew her uncles towards issues of social justice.“They didn’t get that from their families,” she insisted. “None of my grandparents were particularly socialist, quite the contrary. I believe they saw the disparities, the injustice all around them. But they were both middle class. My mum always says Miguel would give the clothes off his back if it meant helping someone else.”
The Latin American left was a diverse array of forces. Some admired the guerrilla tactics of Che Guevara. Others simply advocated for Western European-style labor reforms. Still, others professed Liberation Theology, a strain of Catholicism that stressed concern for the poor.
But after Cuba’s popular uprising against US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista trended towards socialism, any movement from below could be suppressed in the name of fighting the communist threat.
“Some people still say that my uncles and others like them were terrorists,” claims Montes, “that they did all sorts of horrible things, bombed child care centers and schools. Where is the evidence of that?”
“And if they did, why did the military – that was in control of the government, the police and the judicial system – not put them through a trial and in jail? Why did they disappear them and destroy any evidence and witnesses of what they allegedly did?”
Miguel and Guillermo stood firm by their beliefs, even as the military consolidated its rule.
“There is resentment towards them from my parents and grandparents,” says Montes. “They both could have escaped Argentina. They chose to stay knowing what could happen to them.”
Heaven and Earth
Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state through 1977. Then-US President Jimmy Carter continued to support the junta until the following year; when he moved to end arms transfers, Kissinger registered his opposition by attending the 1978 World Cup in Argentina as the personal guest of dictator Jorge Videla.
US relations with the regime were restored and expanded after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as the CIA sought their assistance in training Central American death squads.
Lieutenant General Videla’s government shaped up to be perhaps the most repressive of all those of the Condor era. Of the 60,000 who were killed across the continent, it’s estimated that around half of them were Argentines.
Montes’ grandparents were determined to make sure Miguel and Guillermo weren’t among them.
“[Miguel] was taken and my grandma, who was also widowed around that time, started moving ‘heaven and earth,’ as we say, to find him,” she said. “She was threatened by police and even by the church when she went there, they told her she would end up just like him.”
“My parents met through their mothers’ – my grannies’ – fight to find out what happened to their sons. I used to think it was a very romantic story when I was a child. But the reality is that two very broken people met each other because of one of the most horrific things that happened to them.”
The final years of the dictatorship saw mounting economic instability. The military attempted to distract from the matter by waging war against the United Kingdom for control of the Falkland Islands. When they failed, the days of the junta were numbered.
Liberal democracy was restored in 1983. Time went by, but Miguel and Guillermo were still gone. President Carlos Menem’s pardon of the junta leaders six years later suggested a desire to forget about the nightmare of Argentina’s Dirty War.
It was only in 2003, when new investigations were opened, that the relatives of Argentina’s desaparecidos finally saw the potential to receive some closure. For Montes’ family the process would take over a decade.
“We didn’t get to find out what happened to my uncles until very recently, almost 40 years after the fact,” says Montes. “The only reason we know what happened is because of witnesses, people that survived, who saw them.”
In that moment Miguel and Guillermo reappeared, but only in memory as Montes’ family imagined their tragic last days.
“They were both taken to the same concentration camp, the ESMA. Miguel Angel was tortured with electricity until he died. We don’t know what happened after, his body was likely burned.”
“Guillermo was able to survive the electric torture. He was drugged and put on a plane, and dropped alive in the River Plate.”
Very Present Ghosts
Montes recounts the horrible toll of her uncles’ kidnappings on her family.
“My mum was around 14 years old when her brother disappeared and her dad died. That family was destroyed… Most of the people this happened to have been destroyed: mentally, physically. My parents have had substance abuse issues, mental health issues.”
“A lot of people in my country want us to ‘move on’ from what happened, to stop talking about it. But how can you do that when the collective trauma still remains?”
Montes now feels much differently about her uncles – especially Miguel, who she’s heard many stories about.
“I have since learned a lot about my uncle and believe he was an incredible man. It feels weird to say, when he died at 21. But what made Miguel and Guillermo literally give their lives for what they believed in? I don’t know. I wish I got to meet them, to talk to them.”
Young Miguel Angel Fiorito as an infant (left) and young boy (right) © Courtesy of Agustina Montes
Among the many condolences and the judicious praise of Kissinger as a friend, a pioneer, and even a peacemaker, the eulogy of former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk may contain the most truth: “He was deeply skeptical of those who would aim to try to achieve a peaceful world. He was much more focused on establishing order because order was more reliable than peace.”
“I’m not surprised,” responded Montes. “Order for most, freedom for few.”
And what about George Bush’s comment, that Kissinger was a symbol of “America’s greatness?”
“I feel like they are saying the quiet part out loud. He is a symbol of America’s imperialism,” says Montes.
“Living in South America – and I’m sure this is true of many other so-called ‘Third World countries’ – we get sold this glossy idea of the US, you know? The Land of the Free, of Opportunity, of Freedom and Dreams.”
“I used to be enamored with the US! I grew up watching US TV shows and movies. I learned English from watching ‘Friends.’ It’s only when you grow up a bit that you start seeing it for what it is.”
The Palestinian American scholar Edward Said once remarked:
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.
And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.
When asked about the influence of the junta – and that of Kissinger and the United States – Montes is unequivocal.
“Their legacy is seen in the poverty in the villas, in the sunken eyes of hungry kids all over the world, in the missing but remembered, in the children of women who were taken that we are still looking for. It’s still very much there.”
But Montes doesn’t think the final chapter has been written in the story of Latin America. “I wholeheartedly believe in justice.”
Why Does the West Support the Genocide of Gaza?
And when will its political and media leaders be tried, condemned, and executed?
By Kevin Barret | Crescent International | December 1, 2023
Even Israeli experts call it “a textbook case of genocide.” Those are the exact words of Raz Siegal, an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University. On October 16, Siegal told Democracy Now:
We have to understand that the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948 requires that we see special intent for genocide to happen. And to quote the convention, intent to destroy a group is defined as racial, ethnic, religious or national as such that is collectively, not just individuals. And this intent, as we just heard, is on full display by Israeli politicians and army officers since October 7th. We heard Israel’s president. It’s well-known what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9th declaring a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, stating that “We’re fighting human animals,” and we will react “accordingly.” He also said that “We will eliminate everything.” We know that Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, for example, acknowledged wanton destruction and said explicitly, “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” So we’re seeing the special intent on full display.
And it isn’t just Israelis who are guilty. Leaders of Western countries have given the Gaza Holocaust their full backing. On Saturday, October 7, even as Israeli tanks, rockets, and helicopter gunships were mass-murdering hundreds of Israeli civilian prisoners alongside dozens of their Hamas captors, US President Joe Biden condemned as “unconscionable” the “appalling terrorist attacks” and encouraged what would become genocidal Israeli “retaliation.”
In reality, the Israelis, not Hamas, were the terrorists of October 7. The only mass slaughters of civilians that day were carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces. Hamas’s brave soldiers were under strict orders to attack Israeli military targets and try to capture military hostages, with the taking of civilian hostages being a secondary option or last resort. There were no Hamas orders to kill unarmed civilians, and surviving Israeli hostages speak of the kindness and generosity of their Hamas captors.
Zionist-owned Western media immediately began broadcasting outrageous lies deliberately designed to incite genocide. (Every media person responsible for those lies must some day be tried, convicted and executed.)
Zionist genocide propagandists raved deliriously about Hamas supposedly beheading 40 babies, baking babies in ovens, gouging eyes, mutilating breasts, cutting open naked women, raping women, mutilating dead bodies, spreading cyanide, and on and on. All lies. When Joe Biden endorsed the beheaded babies canard, claiming that he had seen the bodies, he sealed his fate as a self-incriminated genocide inciter who will be executed in the unlikely event that he lives long enough to face trial.
What really happened on October 7 was reasonably clear even then, and has since become undeniable. Hamas scored what Scott Ritter has called “the most successful military raid of this century:”
Hamas effectively neutralized Israel’s vaunted intelligence services, blinding them to the possibility of an attack of this scope and scale…(then) Hamas defeated those Israeli soldiers stationed along the barrier wall in a stand-up fight. Two battalions of the Golani Brigade were routed, as were elements of other vaunted IDF units.
Hamas struck the Headquarters of the Gaza Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control facilities with brutal precision, turning what should have been a five-minute response time into many hours—more than enough time for Hamas to carry out one of its primary objectives—the taking of hostages. This they did with extreme proficiency, returning to Gaza with more than 230 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Hamas fighters killed about 600 Israeli soldiers during the first 24 hours, a total that “included many of Israel’s most elite officers, including dozens of colonels and majors.” After Hamas repeatedly defeated the Israeli military in stand-up fights, and captured hundreds of Israeli prisoners, the Zionists panicked and invoked the Hannibal Directive, according to which heavy weaponry is used to eliminate both hostage takers and hostages. According to an Israeli Air Force officer who participated in the mass murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians along with their Hamas captors, top-level Zionist commanders ordered “mass Hannibal.” In other words, they deliberately ordered the mass slaughter of their own civilians by the hundreds in order to prevent them from becoming hostages and adding to Israel’s political problems. Had they not done so, Hamas would have returned to Gaza with as many as 700 prisoners, rather than the 250 that they actually got.
Israel then used photos of the carnage that they themselves had inflicted—using helicopter gunships, tanks, and rockets—and blamed it on Hamas. Even a cursory look at the photos of the devastated kibbutz buildings, the blown-up buildings at the music festival, and the vast array of shredded automobiles makes it clear that most of the damage was done not by Hamas’s small arms fire, but by Israel’s heavy weaponry. Yet the shameless Zionists, mass-murderers of their own people, had the chutzpah to blame the courageous and ethical soldiers of Hamas for their own crimes!
The West Sparks the Genocide
By October 8 I could see, as could anyone else with eyes, that the images out of Israel showed that the Israelis, not Hamas, were responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths. The Biden Administration, and its CIA daily briefer, must have known the same thing, with even greater certainty and in greater detail. Yet instead of using its knowledge of the truth to restrain Israel’s murderous impulse towards Biblical-scale vengeance, Joe Biden went on television and bloviated about supposedly seeing 40 Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas.
Everything the almost-entirely-Jewish Biden Administration did was calculated to encourage Israel to launch a genocide. And every other Western leader went along, actively or passively, with the genocide plan.
Once the exterminationist carpet-bombing of Gaza was underway, and thousands of women and children murdered, did those Western leaders reverse course and demand that Israel stop? Of course not.
Anthony Blinken, who flew to Tel Aviv first, in the midst of the carpet-bombing, let slip that his pre-eminent loyalty was to the genocidal entity, announcing that he flew to Tel Aviv “not only as the United States Secretary of State but also as a Jew.” (Remove the words only and also from that sentence to understand its real meaning.)
Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv to put his stamp of approval on the genocide. So did UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who described Hamas as “the new Nazis” according to Netanyahu. Second-tier Western powers like Austria and Czechoslovakia also sent their leaders to kiss Netanyahu’s reeking rump and endorse the Gaza Holocaust.
Why has the West’s entire leadership class been falling all over itself competing to see who can move to the head of the line of genocidal war criminals? Can’t they see that the global majority is appalled by the wholesale Zionist atrocities and sides with Palestine? Don’t they realize that the West is hastening its own demise, and ensuring the rise of a non-Western-led world order, by undermining its pretense of concern for international law and human rights?
Several possible reasons for the West’s unanimously-pro-genocide position have been proposed. Some say the West is incorrigibly racist and just doesn’t care about the deaths of brown people, especially Muslims. They add that the West’s undisputed hegemon, the USA, was founded on Old Testament style genocide, and that the formerly Protestant and now Jewish Bible-thumpers of Washington DC share Netanyahu’s vengeful lust for Biblical extermination of “Amalek” (meaning the designated racial enemies of the Jews and/or Americans).
Another potential explanation invokes realpolitik. The US imperial center increasingly dominates the West (the Ukraine war destruction of Nordstream emasculated Europe) but is losing ground elsewhere. Hamas’s crushing defeat of Israel on October 7 struck a powerful blow not only against Zionism, but against the whole Anglo-Zionist Empire. The Biden “minyan” (Jewish-Zionist cabinet) panicked and scrambled to endorse Israeli genocide, not out of sober calculation, but for the same reason that a rabid rat, when cornered, mindlessly lashes out. These people know that the days of the US empire, and the Zionist entity, are numbered, and it drives them crazy. They see that every day the rising countries, led by China, Russia, and Iran, become stronger, and the US and its European vassals grow weaker. Terrified, they realize that if war is to come, the sooner the better, because every day the West’s chances of winning recede. And then, even more terrified, they grasp that it is already too late. So they take out their frustration on the women and children of Gaza.
Another realpolitik-based explanation involves the possibility that US leaders, or at least the most extreme neocon faction, would welcome an all-out war with Iran and the Axis of Resistance—a war which every additional day of genocide brings closer. Even though such a war risks a civilization-imploding World War III, and would at minimum result in tens or hundreds of thousands of Israeli and American casualties, it might at least offer a distraction from looming US defeat in Ukraine. Additionally, a massive war in West Asia would reduce the region to chaos and set back China’s Belt-and-Road plan by a decade or two, thereby prolonging the US imperial illusion by maintaining it on life support for another few years. (China builds, the US destroys, so maximizing destruction prolongs the US imperial agony.)
But in the end, the best explanation for Western leaders’ pro-genocide position involves the role of the media. Allan Thompson’s (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide shows that more than half a million Rwandans were butchered in 1994, most hacked to death with machetes, primarily due to media incitement. By dominating the formation of public opinion, the Rwandan media, especially radio, created a pro-genocide bubble that took on a life of its own. Specifically, by spreading outrageous lies that dehumanized the target group, both broadcast and print media deliberately orchestrated the mass murder of as many as 700,000 people.
This is exactly what mainstream Western media have done in their incitement of the Gaza genocide. The aforementioned lies about beheaded and roasted babies, gouged eyeballs and broken pelvises, and other gory inventions from the fecund sado-masochistic Zionist imagination were deliberately deployed to provoke real mass murders and maimings of Palestinians.
By enthusiastically participating in the Gaza genocide, the West, starting with its media and political elites, has completely discredited itself in the eyes of the world. The era of Western hegemony is coming to an end. The majority of the Earth’s population can now see that anything, absolutely anything, would be better than allowing these genocidal monsters to continue to dominate this planet.
The war criminals have sealed their own so-called civilization’s fate, and condemned their own souls to eternal hellfire. I hope to live long enough, insha’allah, to see them all, every last one of them, dragged to Beijing or Moscow or Tehran and tried for their crimes against humanity and led to the gallows.
Crescent International © 1438 AH. All Rights Reserved.
Field hospitals urgently needed in Gaza Strip
Palestine Information Center – December 1, 2023
GAZA – The Gaza Media Office (GMO) called, in a press conference held on Friday, on Arab and Muslim states to urgently establish field hospitals in the Gaza Strip to save “tens of thousands of injured people”.
The GMO also renewed calls to the UN refugee agency (UNRWA) to resume operations in the central and northern Gaza governorates.
Assistance that reached the Gaza Strip during the ceasefire does not exceed one percent of its needs, the GMO pointed out.
The GMO held the international community, especially Washington, fully responsible for the war.
The Israeli army intensively resumed its attacks across the Gaza Strip early on Friday after the end of the humanitarian pause, causing hundreds of causalities among the Palestinians.
At least 109 Palestinians were killed and many others injured as Israel resumed striking various areas in the Gaza Strip following the end of the pause, said the Health Ministry in Gaza.
A “Nuremberg Trial” for Israel’s Crimes Against Palestinians?
By C.B. Forde | The Postil Magazine | December 1, 2023
Make no mistake. Israel has committed massive crimes in Gaza and in the West Bank against the Palestinians. When will the thousands killed get justice? Or are we all supposed to just go on with our lives and pretend that it’s all the pursuit of “the right of self-defense?” Who are these IDF snipers who anonymously shoot children, and no one is even curious to know who these killers are? Is this the way of war now, according to the “international rules based order” that we should be so proud of in the West, which is supposedly the hallmark of our “civilization?”
A day of reckoning will come. There are good men and women who are wokring to make that a reality.
And what are we to make of our politcal class that utters not a peep about the slaughter that Netanyahu is doing, but who earlier could not get the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, because Putin was assumed to have “kidnapped” Ukrainian orphans that they might have a decent life in Russia. But Netanyahu can kill as many children as he wants, since that is not a crime according to the “rule of law,” so the “jurists” at the ICC stay busy identifying “Russian crimes” that might be spotted at the backs of their cereal boxes.
Kurt Tucholsky was paraphrasing a French joke when he observed that “the death of one person: that’s a catastrophe. One hundred thousand dead: that’s a statistic!”
What Israel has done for over a month in Gaza is now a matter of statistics, for they have killed over 15,000 so far, more than 4000 of them children. It is the Palestinian Holocaust, because there are many more thousands buried under all those pancaked buildings where people once lived. And now that the Israeli assault continues, many thousands more will die.
Given these grim statistics, it becomes more and more important to remember the one person, rather than mention in passing the vast number of the now faceless thousands dead.
One such person was Elham Farah, a Christian Palestinian, living in Gaza, where she had taught music all her life. She was 84 years old and was the daughter of the Palestinian poet, Hannah Farah.
On November 12, 2023, an Israeli sniper shot her in the leg, as she came out of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where she had been sheltering to escape the bombing. She wanted to make sure that her home had not been hit. A sniper was waiting who are trained to shoot in the leg.
Those inside the church tried to rescue her, as she cried out for help, but people were afraid of Israeli snipers who long have had a reputation for being merciless. Elham Farah bled to death over several days. No one came to help her because of the sniping. She had just survived the bombing of Saint Porphyrios, the 850-year-old church in Gaza, which took the lives of 18 other Christians. Is such a death for a gentle old lady acceptable to those who see themselves as “civilized?” And why no one even knows about the crimes of Israeli snipers is unimaginable.
The hell unleashed by the Herod of our time in the Holy Land escapes the mind’s ability to describe horror—to see little children torn apart by bombs, dropped by pilots in their sophisticated flying machines is beyond the reach of words…
Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying:
A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not (Matthew 2:16-18).
“Rama” or “Ramah” is the name of several Palestinian towns, and “Rachel” stands in for all mothers whose children have been slaughtered by the powerful. Such killing was “righteous revenge” because the Hamas razzia of October 7th was fabricated as brutal, with beheaded babies and babies in ovens, when it was the IDF that did most of the slaughter of Israelis that day. Why the need to lie by Israel? The full truth about what really happened on October 7th is now coming out: Hamas killed IDF soldiers in combat. It was not a “terrorist” attack:
Thus on October 7th:
- The IDF killed anything that moved;
- Many Israeli captives were still alive, two days after October 7;
- Israelis were killed by the IDF with heavy shelling of houses and cars;
- Most of the civilian deaths happened because of the IDF;
- It was a razzia by Hamas because most of the captives taken were IDF officers.
And in the West, we have the war enthusiasts, eagerly cheering on Netanyahu and his ilk to kill more, to kill without compunction, for there will be no red lines drawn, because Israel is for “civilization,” because that is how you fight wars, by killing as many babies as you can with bombs.
Perhaps in the months or even years ahead, there will come a time for a “Nuremberg Trial” for the murderers that are now in power in Israel—and for the IDF soldiers snipers who shot down Elham Farah and the two liitle Christian Palestinian boys, and also for the many “journalists” and “scholars” who justified and whitewashed the crimes against humnaity now permanently recorded for the world to see. Remember, they did hang Julius Streicher, even though he perosnally had killed no one.
Henry and Hillary – Familiar Bedfellows
By Sheldon Richman | FFF | November 19, 2014
It says a lot about former secretary of state and presumed presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton that she’s a member of the Henry Kissinger Fan Club. Progressives who despised George W. Bush might want to examine any warm, fuzzy feelings they harbor for Clinton.
She has made no effort to hide her admiration for Kissinger and his geopolitical views. Now she lays it all out clearly in a Washington Post review of his latest book, World Order.
Clinton acknowledges differences with Kissinger, but apparently these do not keep her from saying that “his analysis … largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.”
Beware of politicians and courtiers who issue solemn declarations about building global architectures. To them the rest of us are mere “pieces upon a chess-board.” Security and cooperation are always the announced ends, yet the ostensible beneficiaries usually come to grief. Look where such poseurs have been most active: the Middle East, North Africa, Ukraine. As they say about lawyers, if we didn’t have so-called statesmen, we wouldn’t need them.
If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect some pseudonymous writer of having fun with irony in this review. Behold:
President Obama explained the overarching challenge we faced in his Nobel lecture in December 2009. After World War II, he said, “America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace…”
Keep the peace — if you don’t count the mass atrocity that was the Vietnam War, the U.S.-sponsored Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and various massacres carried out by U.S.-backed “leaders” in such places as Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), East Timor, Chile, and elsewhere.
One Henry Kissinger had a hand in all these crimes, by the way. Strangely, Clinton doesn’t mention them. (See Christopher Hitchens’s devastating two-part indictment here and here, later turned into The Trial of Henry Kissinger.)
America, at its best, is a problem-solving nation.
Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya are only the latest examples of problems America solved during Madam Secretary’s tenure, building on the glorious successes of George W. Bush’s team. Henry the K is no doubt flattered by the homage.
Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.
Now things make sense. That Hillary Clinton thought Kissinger — Henry Kissinger — a worthy advisor is something we should all know as 2016 looms.
What comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.
There really is no viable alternative. No other nation can bring together the necessary coalitions and provide the necessary capabilities to meet today’s complex global threats. But this leadership is not a birthright; it is a responsibility that must be assumed with determination and humility by each generation.
It takes chutzpah to write humility even remotely in connection with Kissinger. And if the U.S. empire is indispensable to justice and liberalism — and where are these, exactly? — we are in trouble. The record is not encouraging. Kissingerian “realism” creates global threats.
The things that make us who we are as a nation — our diverse and open society, our devotion to human rights and democratic values — give us a singular advantage in building a future in which the forces of freedom and cooperation prevail over those of division, dictatorship and destruction.
Devotion to human rights and democratic values — as shown in Egypt, where Clinton stuck by another friend, Hosni Mubarak, against a popular uprising. The woman has some friends!
“Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just — not only by leaders, but also by citizens,” he writes.
The suggestion that Kissinger cares what ordinary citizens anywhere think is ridiculous. What he cares about is states, which he puts in one of two categories: those that buckle under to the Indispensable Empire and those that do not.
Henry, er, Hillary in 2016? You might want to rethink that.
Henry Kissinger, America’s most notorious war criminal
Press TV – December 1, 2023
The most notorious and hawkish America’s former top diplomat, known more for his war crimes and export of imperialism than diplomacy, died on Thursday. He was 100.
Henry Kissinger, a key architect of America’s Cold War foreign policy during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, breathed his last at his home in Kent, Connecticut.
While in the United States, he is often lauded for bringing about rapprochement with China, around the world, he is known as an infamous war criminal with blood of millions of people on his hands.
It is estimated that the victims of his blatant war crimes number from several hundred thousand to several million, from Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, to Vietnam.
In 1973, quite scandalously, he was handed a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire deal in the Vietnam War, although the earlier flare-up and spread of the devastating war to neighboring Cambodia was entirely his handiwork.
In the eight years that he was the US Secretary of State, Kissinger shaped America’s interventionist foreign policy, which later became a benchmark for his successors to export American hegemony and imperialism around the world.
Christopher Hitchens, the author of The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in his 2001 book called for the former top US diplomat to be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murders, kidnappings and torture across the world.
“The US could either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else,” wrote Hitchens.
What are Kissinger’s main crimes?
One of his most notorious roles was in Cambodia, where he masterminded the expansion of the Vietnam War through a secret bombing campaign in 1969 and ground invasions by US forces for years.
The US is believed to have rained down more than 540,000 tonnes of bombs in a campaign called Operation Menu that was executed without the backing or knowledge of the US Congress.
The deadly military adventure caused an eight-year civil war between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge regime, which led to the killing of around 275,000–310,000 people and displaced millions of others.
In declassified cables in 1970, Kissinger was heard conveying this message to his deputy Alexander Haig after speaking to Nixon: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia… It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”
Author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, after visiting Cambodia, wrote in his 2011 book A Cook’s Tour: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands”.
“Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
He also played an instrumental role in the massacre of the East Timorese people by the Indonesian forces in the mid-1970s.
Kissinger and President Ford, during a meeting with the Indonesian dictator Suharto in December 1975, gave him instructions to invade East Timor, which triggered a civil war that left at least 200,000 people dead, according to 2001 declassified documents.
In Chile, Kissinger worked behind the scenes to destabilize and undermine the government of Salvador Allende who was seen as a threat to US hegemony in South America at a time when all other Latin American countries had US-installed military dictatorships.
Less than three years into Allende’s rule, amid skyrocketing inflation and massive strikes that were orchestrated by the CIA, a US-engineered coup led by General Augusto Pinochet toppled the democratically-elected government.
A Chilean government report later revealed that over 40,000 people were killed, tortured, or imprisoned during Pinochet’s murderous regime at the behest of the US government and Kissinger.
In Argentina, Kissinger militarily backed junta leader General Jorge Rafael Videla after he toppled the democratically-elected government of President Isabel Perón in March 1976, according to declassified cables.
These actions led to the Dirty War between 1976 and 1983, where Argentina’s military junta killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Many of them were subjected to enforced disappearances.
Kissinger was also involved in Bangladesh, previously known as East Pakistan, where he and Nixon backed the genocide of people by West Pakistan.
Following his death on Thursday, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said Kissinger backed the Pakistani military regime during the 1971 war and failed to apologize to the people of Bangladesh for his actions.
Kissinger was also responsible for consolidating the US vassal dictatorship in Iran in the 1970s, which had long-lasting unwanted consequences for Washington.
What role did Kissinger play in Iran?
Kissinger’s political opportunism is particularly evident in the example of relations with Iran, which American diplomacy under his leadership saw, in the words of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, as a “milking cow.”
In the 1970s, accompanying then-US President Nixon, he traveled to Tehran and initiated massive military deals on the export of arms worth billions of dollars to Iran.
In his eyes, the best solution for Iran was a rigid military dictatorship that would spend massively on American weapons and other expensive products, and at the same time play the role of a US proxy against the regional countries that refused to lean toward Washington.
Such an attitude was formed partly as a consequence of the defeat in the Vietnam War, which is why the American authorities did not like the idea of repeating the same scenario in West Asia, with huge American casualties.
In 1975, when he held the position of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Kissinger was the key man in signing a $15 billion deal that included $6.4 billion for the purchase of eight US nuclear reactors.
The Shah’s regime then planned to build a total of twenty nuclear power plants with the import of enriched uranium, for which Washington and its allies showed great enthusiasm, seeing it as a lucrative opportunity for their companies.
These treaties collapsed four years later due to mass popular discontent with the West-backed dictatorship and the success of the Islamic Revolution, the prospect of which Kissinger understandably dreaded.
He was among the loudest proponents of providing asylum to the deposed Shah, arguing that it was America’s “moral obligation.”
On the aggression of the Baathist Iraqi regime on Iran, he said “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
Three decades later, when Iran announced the continuation of the development of a civilian nuclear program, this time with its own technology and without multibillion-dollar contracts with American and Western companies, Kissinger turned the tables.
In an opinion piece for the Washington Post in 2005, Kissinger wrote that “for a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources.”
This radical switch once again confirmed that Americans have an essential problem with the technological prowess and progress of independent countries because they believe only the US has the right to a monopoly of advanced technologies.
In the 2000s, Kissinger became an advocate of American interventionism in West Asia and met regularly with then-US President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to advise them on the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The collapse of American imperial ambitions in Iraq and other countries of the region culminated in his intensified anti-Iranian rhetoric.
In 2014, when Iraq and Syria were under the grip of Takfiri terrorism, he stated that “Iran is a bigger problem than Daesh,” arguing that the latter’s fall would open the door to Tehran’s alleged “imperial agendas.”
In addition to giving unequivocal support to anti-Iranian terrorism, he also strongly opposed the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, clinched during the presidency of Barack Obama.
He maintained the same stance after Obama’s megalomaniac successor Donald Trump scrapped the deal, saying any attempts to reinstall the deal are “extremely dangerous.”
Recruitment company cuts ties with Israel arms manufacturer in UK
MEMO | December 1, 2023
As part of efforts to drive iO Associates to cut ties with Elbit, activists stormed and occupied its Manchester office on 1 September and again on the 7th October. Activists painted iO offices red on 9 October in London, Reading and Manchester. They were forced to vacate their Manchester offices from 11 October, after the premises were also stormed by the Youth Front For Palestine, and then finally targeted in Edinburgh twice, on the 11 and 17 October.
Hamas: Israel made decision to resume its criminal aggression
Palestine Information Center – December 1, 2023
GAZA – The Hamas Movement said in a statement issued Friday that the Israeli occupation bore responsibility for the end of the truce for rejecting terms to free more hostages and extend it.
The Movement pointed out that Israel refused an offer to release more captives and the dead bodies of an Israeli family killed in Israeli air strikes.
“We offered to hand over the bodies of the Bibas family, release their father so that he can participate in their burial, and hand over two Israeli captives,” the group said in a statement.
Israel refused “all these offers because it had made a prior decision to resume its criminal aggression against the Gaza Strip,” it added.
Hamas held the US administration and its president, Biden, fully responsible for the continuation of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip after its absolute support and the green light it gave it following its Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Israel.
The group also stressed that the Palestinian people and resistance led by Al-Qassam Brigades are steadfast.
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Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
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