First Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces in 2019 was struck in head with tear-gas canister
Abdel-Raouf Ismail Mohammad Salha (13) succumbed to wounds sustained during Great March of Return on 11 January 2019. [Twitter]
MEMO | January 17, 2019
The first Palestinian child killed by Israeli occupation forces in 2019 was struck in the head by a tear-gas canister during the suppression of protests in the Gaza Strip.
According to Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), Abdel-Raouf Ismail Mohammad Salha – just 13-years-old – was “struck on the left side of his head by an Israeli-fired tear gas canister that caused a brain injury on the afternoon of January 11”.
The child was pronounced dead from his injuries three days later in Gaza City’s Shifa hospital.
“Crowd control weapons such as tear gas canisters can become lethal weapons when fired at children, especially if the point of impact is on a child’s head or torso,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Accountability Program director for DCIP.
In 2018, the NGO documented “three cases where children died after tear gas canisters fired by Israeli forces struck them”.
On the day in question, Abdel-Raouf was “participating in a weekly protest in the Abu Safia hill area, southeast of Beit Hanoun”. At around 4pm, while the boy was “standing approximately 150 meters (492 feet) from the perimeter fence with a group of other protesters”, Israeli forces in military jeeps from the other side of the perimeter fence “fired tear gas canisters at the group”.
“The witness saw Abdel-Raouf collapse and a wound bleeding from his head”, DCIP added.
Doctors told DCIP that “the force of impact caused a skull fracture and fragments of bone to enter the boy’s brain”.
In 2018, DCIP “independently verified the deaths of 57 Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli forces or settlers across the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, including 49 killed in the Gaza Strip.
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Israel killing of Palestine children in Gaza protests amounts to ‘war crimes’
Eisenhower’s Starvation Order
A holocaust was what the Americans did to the Germans
By James Bacque
Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about 300,000, the French around 200,000. Uncounted millions of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about 640,000 entering Soviet captivity.
As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an “urgent courier” throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners … The order was sent in German to the provincial governments, ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments. Copies of the orders were discovered recently in several villages near the Rhine … The message [which Bacque reproduces] reads in part: “… under no circumstances may food supplies be assembled among the local inhabitants in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war. Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the prisoners place themselves in danger of being shot….”
Eisenhower’s order was also posted in English, German and Polish on the bulletin board of Military Government Headquarters in Bavaria, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Military Governor of Bavaria. Later it was posted in Polish in Straubing and Regensburg, where there were many Polish guard companies at nearby camps. One US Army officer who read the posted order in May 1945 has written that it was “the intention of Army command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as many POWs as the traffic would bear without international scrutiny.”
… The [American] army’s policy was to starve [German] prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy college in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that “it is our policy that these men not be fed.” The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, “If you do that again, you’ll be shot.” Brech saw bodies go out of the camp “by the truckload” but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how.
… The prisoner Paul Schmitt was shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to prisoners. The memorial to her in nearby Buedesheim, written by one of her chidren, reads: “On the 31st of July 1945, my mother was suddenly and unexpectedly torn from me because of her good deed toward the imprisoned soldiers.” The entry in the Catholic church register says simply: “A tragic demise, shot in Dietersheim on 31.07.1945. Buried on 03.08.1945.” Martin Brech watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a hillside firing shots towards German women running away from him in the valley below.
The prisoner Hans Scharf … was watching as a German woman with her two children came towards an American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband, who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground and killed the prisoner with five shots.
…. Many prisoners and German civilians saw the American guards burn the food brought by civilian women. One former prisoner described it recently: “At first, the women from the nearby town brought food into the camp. The American soldiers took everything away from the women, threw it in a heap and poured gasoline [benzine] over it and burned it.” Eisenhower himself ordered that the food be destroyed, according to the writer Karl Vogel, who was the German camp commander appointed by the Americans in Camp 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Although the prisoners were getting only 800 calories per day, the Americans were destroying food outside the camp gate.
James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, pp. 41-45, 94-95.
A Clinton Memo That Killed Half a Million People
By Daniel Lazare | Consortium News | January 11, 2019
A Hillary Clinton memo that Wikileaks made public in 2016 has not gotten the attention it deserves.
It takes us back to 2012 and the early phase of the Syrian war.
At that point, it was largely an internal affair, although Saudi arms shipments were playing a greater and greater role in bolstering rebel forces. But once the Obama administration decided in favor of intervention, the conflict was quickly internationalized as thousands of holy warriors flooded in from as far away as western China.
The 1,200-word memo by then-Secretary of State Clinton begins with the subject of Iran, an important patron of Syria.
She dismisses any notion that nuclear talks will stop Iran “from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program—the capability to enrich uranium.” If it does get the bomb, it goes on, Israel will suffer a strategic setback since it will no longer be able to “respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.” Denied the ability to bomb at will, Israel might leave off secondary targets and strike at the main enemy instead.
Consequently, Clinton argues that the U.S. should topple the Assad regime so as to weaken Iran and allay the fears of Israel, which has long regarded the Islamic republic as its primary enemy. As the memo puts it:
“Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.”
This document making the case to arm Syrian rebels may have been largely overlooked because of the dates, which appear to be inaccurate.
One line gives the time as “2001-01-01 03:00” even though Clinton was still a New York senator-elect at that point. That date is also out of synch with the timeline of nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
Another contains a State Department case and document number and a date of Nov. 30, 2015. But that’s incorrect as well since it postdates Clinton’s resignation as secretary of state by better than two and a half years.
Central to the Great Debate
Consequently, anyone stumbling across the memo in the Wikileaks archives would have no idea of how its rather loopy logic figures in the great debate about whether to use force to bring down Syrian President Bashir al-Assad. But textual clues provide an answer. The second paragraph refers to nuclear talks with Iran “that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May,” events that took place in 2012. The sixth invokes an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour conducted with then-Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak “last week.” Since the interview took place on April 19, 2012, the memo can therefore be dated to the fourth week in April. This is shortly before Clinton joined forces with then-CIA Director David Petraeus to push for an aggressive program of rebel military aid.
Needless to say, Clinton’s skepticism about negotiating with Iran proved to be unwarranted since Iran eventually agreed to shut down its nuclear program. The memo thus illustrates her hawkishness along with her conviction that Israeli security trumps all other considerations even if it means setting fire to a region that’s been burned over more than once.
But the memo illustrates much else besides: Clinton’s recklessness, her lack of realism and her almost mystical belief that everything will fall neatly into place once the United States flexes its muscle. Overthrowing Assad would be nothing less than “transformative,” she writes:
“… Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes. For Israel, the rationale for a bolt from the blue attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be eased. And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on the frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles.”
It was “a low-cost high-payoff approach,” she writes, that would eliminate one enemy, weaken two more, and generate such joy among ordinary Syrians that peace talks between Damascus and Tel Aviv will spring back to life. The risks were nil. Since “the Libyan operation had no long-lasting consequences for the region,” the memo says, referring to the overthrow of strongman Muammer Gaddafi six months earlier, the Syrian operation wouldn’t either:
“Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example [in which NATO bombed Russian-ally Serbia] shows otherwise. In that case, Russia had genuine ethnic and political ties to the Serbs, which don’t exist between Russia and Syria, and even then Russia did little more than complain. Russian officials have already acknowledged they won’t stand in the way if intervention comes.”
So, there was nothing to worry about. Sixty-five years of Arab-Israeli conflict would fall by the wayside while Russia remains safely marginalized.
How it Turned Out
Needless to say, that’s not how things turned out. At that moment, Libya seemed under control. But three or four months later, it would explode as Western-backed Islamist militias blasted away at one another, imposing strict Sharia law, re-instituting slavery and rolling back decades of social progress. Once President Barack Obama approved a modified version of the Clinton-Petraeus plan, Syria would plunge into the same abyss as jihadis funded by Saudi Arabia and the other oil monarchies spread sectarian violence and fear.
Clinton’s assumption that the U.S. could neatly and cleanly decapitate the Syrian government without having to worry about broader consequences was little short of deluded.
The notion that ordinary Syrians would fall to their knees in gratitude was ludicrous while her disregard for the intricacies of Syrian politics was astonishing.
Then there’s the memo’s blithe suggestion that Washington “work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train, and arm Syrian rebel forces.”
In late 2009, Clinton wrote in another diplomatic memo made public by Wikileaks that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” So what made her think two years later that the kingdom would not fund Syrian jihadis of precisely the same ilk?
The 2009 memo slammed Qatar for allowing Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist groups to use the sheikdom “as a fundraising locale.” So what made her think that a pro-Al Qaeda autocracy would now help Syrians “fight for their freedom,” as the memo puts it? Wouldn’t Qatar be more likely to remove what little freedom Syrians had left? Of course, it would.
There is a remarkable continuity between the Syria policy that Clinton was proposing and earlier policies in Afghanistan and Libya. In the first, U.S. military aid wound up flowing to the notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a religious sectarian and raging anti-western xenophobe who nonetheless was “the most efficient at killing Soviets,” as Steve Coll put it in “Ghost Wars,” his bestselling 2004 account of the CIA’s love affair with jihad.
Hekmatyar’s cutthroats wound up with the lion’s share of American arms. More or less the same thing happened in Libya once Clinton persuaded Qatar to join the anti-Gaddafi coalition. The sheikhdom seized the opportunity to distribute some $400 million to various rebel militias, many of them Islamist. The Obama administration said nothing in response.
British Fighters with International Freedom Battalion in northern Iraq. (Wikimedia)
Once again, U.S. arms and materiel flowed to the most reactionary elements. The same would happen in Syria where U.S. and Saudi arms went to the local Al Qaeda affiliate, known as Jabhat al-Nusra, and even to ISIS, as a meticulous report by Conflict Armament Research, a Swiss and EU-funded study group in London, has shown. (See “Did Obama Arm Islamic State Killers?” Consortium News, Dec. 21, 2017.)
Insurgency Mix
By August 2012, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency report found that Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda were already “the major forces driving the insurgency” and that the U.S. and Gulf states backed them regardless. Speechwriter Ben Rhodes summed up the problem of “moderate” rebels who were indistinguishable from Al Qaeda in his White House memoir, “The World As It Is.” In that, he writes that “Al Nusra was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition, and while there were extremist elements in the group, it was also clear that the more moderate opposition was fighting side by side with al Nusra. I argued that labeling al Nusra as terrorists would alienate the same people we want to help, while giving al Nusra less incentive to avoid extremist affiliations.”
The problem was how to separate the “good” Al Qaeda fighters from the “bad.” Rhodes later complained when Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he and his fellow Obama officials were “trying to climb a spruce tree naked without scratching our ass.” This was “smug,” Rhodes says. But Putin was merely using a colorful expression to say that the policy made no sense; which it didn’t.
The cost, half a dozen years after the Clinton email, is staggering. As many as 560,000 people have died, half the population has been displaced, while the World Bank has estimated total war damage at $226 billion, roughly six years’ income for every Syrian man, woman, and child. A cockeyed memo thus unleashed a real-life catastrophe that refuses to go away. It’s a nightmare from which President Donald Trump is struggling to escape in his confused and deluded way and that the Deep State – everyone from arch-neocon John Bolton to “liberal” Nancy Pelosi– is determined to renew.
The Palestinian Children Killed by Israel in 2018 Have Been Forgotten by the World
By Ramona Wadi | Palestine Chronicle | January 9, 2019
Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP) paints a bleak prospect for Palestinian children in revealing that in 2018, at least 56 were killed by Israel. Individuals who witnessed some of the murders have insisted that the targeted children were unarmed and posed no threat to the state or its citizens.
Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli army snipers, drones and security forces across the occupied Palestinian territories. Five of the murdered children were under 12 years of age. In Gaza, 49 children were murdered by Israel in activities pertaining to the Great March of Return protests.
Live ammunition was used by Israel in 73 percent of the fatalities documented by DCIP, which also recorded “140 cases of Palestinian children who were detained by Palestinian forces.” Israeli forces also arrested 120 children within the occupied West Bank. In both groups, the detained children suffered abuse at the hands of the security forces holding them, whether the PA or the Israeli military.
These tactics show that Israel’s colonial collaboration with the Palestinian Authority is targeting a very vulnerable segment of Palestinian society. What’s more, the killing and wounding of Palestinian children by Israeli snipers at the Great March of Return is a direct maiming of the generation which can carry on the anti-colonial struggle.
Citing international law is pointless when Israel, and even the Palestinian Authority, have extended the parameters for an ongoing cycle of abuse against Palestinian children. International law is only relevant when used to point out that violations are taking place and the Palestinians are facing a UN member state which treats international law with contempt, while the international community gives its tacit agreement to the abuse and is, in some cases, complicit.
DCIP’s research establishes the fact that Israel killed an average of more than one child per week in 2018. Earlier shocking official statistics revealed that between 2000 and 2014 Israel killed a Palestinian child every three days on average, for fourteen years. Throughout the year there was ongoing discussion about Israel’s genocidal intent and actions which were mostly discarded due to the monopoly over the term in reference to the Holocaust. Yet, Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the term as “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” What else is Israel doing to the people of Palestine, “in whole or in part”?
The international community’s responses are so predictable that Israel finds no obstacles in maneuvering beyond the limits set by international law; it is allowed to act with impunity. The “drip, drip” rate of the killing of Palestinian children and the almost routine nature of their detention sneaks under the radar of human rights violations. As the international community fails to respond to Israeli violations within its established framework, Israel succeeds in bridging the gap between violations and rights.
To speak of Israel’s violations now is, in fact, also to speak of the international community’s irresponsibility. Yet neither are scrutinized and held to account; the result is the regular yet somewhat reluctant citing of what should happen according to international law being juxtaposed against Israeli breaches of the law. Accountability, however, has long since absconded from the scene of the crime. If Israel wants to kill Palestinian children (or women and men, come to that), it will kill because it has decided, quite deliberately, to do so.
Meanwhile, the international community will steer clear from ever associating Israeli actions with genocide, preferring instead to rely on “alleged war crimes”, the perpetrators of which will never be brought to justice. Palestinian children killed by Israel over many years, last year included, have been forgotten by the world.
Syria: US-Led Coalition Creating Appropriate Conditions for ISIL to Survive, Expand
Al-Manar | January 6, 2019
Syrian Foreign Ministry lashed out at the US-led coalition over crimes committed against civilians in the war-torn country, stressing that the coalition have been creating appropriate conditions for ISIL terror group to survive.
In a letter sent on Saturday to both UN Secretary-General and the UN Security Council, the Syrian ministry said “the continuous massacres against the Syrian civilians and destroying their houses and livelihoods by the illegitimate US-led coalition confirms the necessity to address the disregard showed by countries of this coalition with regard to UN Charter and the provisions of international law.”
The ministry was referring to strikes carried out by warplanes of the US-led coalition in Syria, the last of which were in al-kishkiah and al-Shaf’a villages in Deir Ezzor southeastern countryside.
“Since its establishment, the international coalition’s practices only served to create the appropriate conditions to enable Daesh (ISIS) terrorist organization to survive and expand again,” the letter read, according to SANA news agency.
The ministry meanwhile, renewed its demand that the Security Council “should shoulder its responsibilities and take immediate action to stop these crimes, attacks, massacres, and systematic destruction of infrastructure in Syria and punish their perpetrators.”
Israel threatens family of ‘wanted’ Palestinian with expulsion
Ma’an – January 5, 2019
RAMALLAH – The Israeli army informed members of the al-Barghouthi family from Kobar village, northwest of central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah and al-Bireh, on Saturday, that the family would be expelled to the Jericho district, if their son, Assem, does not turn himself in to the Israeli army.
Israel accuses Assem of carrying out an attack killing two Israeli soldiers near Ramallah on December 13, one day after his brother, Saleh, was reportedly shot and killed by Israeli soldiers north of Ramallah.
Assem has been ‘wanted’ by Israeli forces since then; on December 19th, Israeli forces took measurements of al-Barghouthi’s home in preparation for its demolition as punishment.
Saleh’s family says that Saleh was detained alive and might have died in custody.
Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq had sent a sent a joint urgent appeal to the United Nations (UN) Special Procedures regarding the enforced disappearance of al-Barghouthi.
Israeli soldiers claim that Saleh, who they say was allegedly responsible for shooting and injuring seven Israelis days earlier near Ramallah, was shot and critically injured and later died of his wounds.
Al-Barghouthi’s mother said that large numbers of Israeli force raided their home early Saturday morning, interrogated her and told her son, Assem, has three days to turn himself in or the entire family will be expelled to Jericho.
She added that Israeli forces also detained her youngest son, Muhammad, 17, and her brother, Lutfi al-Barghouthi.
Israeli forces had previously detained her husband and other son a day after the alleged attack.
Clashes erupted between Israeli forces and locals of Kobar; soldiers fired tear gas, causing tear-gas suffocation cases.
Last week, Israeli forces detained 10 Palestinians from Kobar as part of Israel’s “collective punishment” policy against the village following al-Bsrghouthi’s alleged attack.
US wants Iranians to ‘have better lives’ with sanctions: Pompeo
Press TV – January 4, 2019
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Washington’s tough sanctions against the Islamic Republic are aimed at giving the Iranian people a chance to have better lives.
“The sanctions on Iran have this ultimate goal: creating an outcome where the Iranian people can have better lives than they have today,” Pompeo told Newsmax TV on Thursday.
The administration of US President Donald Trump announced on November 5 the reimposition of the “toughest” sanctions ever against Iran’s banking and energy sectors with the aim of cutting off its oil sales and crucial exports. The bans had been lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
While the US claims the bans do not target civilians and ordinary people, they are actually hampering the import of food and medicine to the country, endangering the lives of millions of patients in Iran.
Pompeo earlier told BBC Persian that Iranian officials must listen to Washington “if they want their people to eat.”
He also said since the re-introduction of the sanctions, there was no sign yet that Iranian officials would return to the negotiating table.
“We have provided, we have accommodated the Iranian people with our sanctions, and it’s now the Iranian government’s responsibility to make sure that they do the right thing…It’s their job to do the right thing for their people,” he noted.
In reaction to his comments, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Pompeo’s open threat to starve the Iranian nation was “a crime against humanity” and “a desperate attempt to impose US whims on Iran.”
“Like his predecessors, he’ll also learn that—in spite of US efforts—Iran will not just survive but advance w/out sacrificing its sovereignty,” Zarif said.
US has ‘lots of things’ to work on with Turkey
In his interview with Newsmax TV, Pompeo also referred to Washington’s ties with Ankara, saying the US has “lots of things to work on with the Turks” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“There are places where they are very supportive of the things that Americans care about, which keep Americans safe,” Pompeo said.
“There are other places where we have real concerns,” the secretary added. “We still have Americans who are being held there. The conversation with the Turks continues.”
Pompeo also announced that National Security Adviser John Bolton and Jim Jeffrey, special representative for Syrian engagement, will meet with Turkish officials next week “to talk about Syria.”
“There are lots of places where we need to work with President Erdogan and the Turkish leadership to get good outcomes for the United States.”
The comments came as the US is reportedly evacuating its military bases in Syria after President Trump pledged to pull American forces out of the war-torn Arab country.
America’s military presence in northern parts of Syria, where US troops are working closely with Kurdish groups, have drawn fire from Turkey.
Ankara has launched its own military incursion into Syria, with a declared goal of destroying Kurdish groups causing unrest in Turkish territories.
Upon announcing his decision to leave Syria, Trump said Turkey would be taking on the US military responsibilities in the country.
More Reckless Behavior by Israel: Netanyahu Plays by His Own Rules
By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 03.01.2019
As has become the normal practice, Christmas Day’s air raid by Israel directed against targets near Damascus was largely ignored by the US media. Given the fact that Israel has bombed Syria more than two hundred times, the attack itself, which wounded three soldiers at a warehouse, was not particularly notable. But what was significant was the fact that it was the second time that Israel has used other planes to mask the approach of its own warplanes to the target. On this occasion, the masks consisted of two civilian airliners making their approaches to the airports in Beirut and Damascus. Fortunately, the Syrian Arab Air Defense Forces made the decision to delay the deployment of surface-to-air missiles and electronic jamming “to prevent a tragedy” and air traffic control was able to divert one of the passenger jets landing at Damascus to the reserve military airport in Khmeimim in southern Latakia.
Syrian anti-aircraft crews did manage to intercept and shoot down fourteen of the sixteen incoming missiles that were launched by six Israeli F-16 warplanes using US-made GPS-guided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs). If the Syrian air defenses had been more reckless and gone after the F-16s themselves, they might have hit an airliner by mistake and hundreds of lives could have been lost.
The Russian Ministry of Defense, which was able to reconstruct the attack from radar imaging, condemned the incident, stating that “Provocative acts by the Israeli Air Force endangered two passenger jets when six of their F-16s carried out airstrikes on Syria from Lebanese airspace.” The terse Russian announcement reveals that beyond endangering hundreds of civilians, Israel had committed several war crimes in its action, which the Israeli government claimed was intended to destroy a shipment of Iranian-made Fajir-5 rockets, which was allegedly on its way to Hezbollah.
As Israel is not at war with Iran or Syria or Lebanon and it persists in attacking targets in Syria based on its own perception of threats, it meets the United Nations definition of an aggressor. And its violation of Lebanese air space to stage the attack on Syria was also an act of aggression. Both would normally be condemned in the UN Security Council but for the American veto protecting Israel.
Analysts have confirmed that the Israelis carried out the strikes in Syria by deliberately using scheduled airline departures and arrivals as cover to foil the improved and upgraded Syrian air defenses. Security sources in the region now believe that any civilian flights entering or leaving Damascus or Beirut are potentially in danger due to the Israeli tactics, which clearly accept endangering civilians to mask the movements of the warplanes.
The Israelis also used a Russian intelligence plane as a mask off the coast of Syria back in September, with fatal results for the crew after Syrian air defenses responded to the attack. Israel, of course, claimed innocence, insisting that it was the Syrians who shot down the Russian aircraft while the Israeli jets were legitimately targeting a Syrian army facility “from which weapons-manufacturing systems were supposed to be transferred to Iran and Hezbollah.”
The Russian aircraft was returning to base after a mission over the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast monitoring the activities of a French warship and at least one British RAF plane. As a large and relatively slow propeller driven aircraft on a routine intelligence gathering mission, the Ilyushin-20 had no reason to conceal its presence. It was apparently preparing to land at its airbase at Khmeimim when the incident took place.
Syrian air defenses were on high alert because Israel had attacked targets near Damascus on the previous day, including a Boeing 747 on the ground that Israel claimed to be transporting weapons.
The Israelis used four F-16 fighter bombers to stage the surprise night attack targeting sites near Latakia, close to the airbase being used by the Russians. They came in from the Mediterranean Sea using the Russian plane to mask their approach as the Ilyushin 20 would have presented a much larger radar profile for the air defenses.
The Israelis might have been expecting that the Syrians would not fire at all at the incoming planes knowing that one of them at least was being flown by their Russian allies. If that was the expectation, it proved wrong and it was indeed a Syrian S-200 ground to air missile directed by its guidance system to the larger target that brought down the plane and killed its fourteen crew members.
There was also a back story. The Israelis and Russian military had established a hotline precisely intended to avoid accidents. Israel reportedly used the line but only one minute before the incident took place, leaving no time for the Russian plane to take evasive action.
The Russian Ministry of Defense was irate. It saw the exploitation of the intelligence plane by the Israelis as a deliberate high-risk initiative. It warned “We consider these provocative actions by Israel as hostile. Fifteen Russian military service members have died because of the irresponsible actions of the Israeli military. This is absolutely contrary to the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership. We reserve the right for an adequate response.”
It’s the same old story. Israel does risky things like attacking its neighbors because it knows it will pay no price due to Washington’s support. The downing of the Russian plane and the current endangering civil aviation has created a situation that could easily escalate. What Israel is really thinking when it seeks to create anarchy all around its borders is anyone’s guess, but it is, to be sure, in no one’s interest to allow the process to continue.
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From the Archives
Britain’s secret role in the brutal US war in Vietnam
By Mark Curtis | MintPress News | November 16, 2022
There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.
- UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US
- UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
- Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
- It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
- UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
- Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable
During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.
Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.
Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show. … continue
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- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
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