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Top UN expert urges trial for EU officials over complicity in Israel’s war crimes

Press TV – May 4, 2025

The top expert on Palestine at the UN has called for senior EU officials, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas to face prosecution for their complicity in Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza.

“The fact that the two highest figures of the EU continue business as usual engagements with Israel is beyond deplorable,” said UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese in an interview ran by The Intercept on Saturday.

“I’m not someone who says, ‘History will judge them’ — they will have to be judged before then. And they will have to understand that immunity cannot equate with impunity,” she added.

Israel has killed nearly 52,500 people and destroyed Gaza’s entire civilian infrastructure. Most of the dead have been civilians, including tens of thousands of children and women.

Israel’s initial aim of exchanging captives with Hamas has turned into a US-backed vision for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza.

To that end, the Israeli military has increased its lethal attacks after breaking a 2-month ceasefire deal with Hamas on March 18.

It has enforced a complete blockade on humanitarian aid, electricity, food, and water since March 2, marking the longest aid blockade since the start of the genocide nearly 19 months ago.

Human rights organizations have repeatedly called on the EU members to boycott Israel and stop selling weapons to the regime.

Nonetheless, since taking office in December, Kallas has blamed Hamas for Israel’s decision to end the ceasefire, continued normal diplomatic relations, and vowed to “stand in solidarity with Israel.”

A complaint against Leyen, the European Commission president, was also filed at the International Criminal Court last May for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Evidence has shown that the EU has turned into a foundation upon which, the member countries contact and make deals with the Israeli regime.

Beyond demanding accountability from EU leaders, Albanese has said she has been working on a report that will expose banks, pension funds, tech companies, and universities for complicity in Gaza’s destruction.

“All those implicated and involved in the unlawful occupation, in providing it with support, are aiding and abetting violations of international law and human rights violations, and a number of these amount to crimes,” she said.

“There can be individual responsibility and individual liability for those who have been aiding and abetting or enabling such crimes,” she added.

May 4, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

An open letter to Madame Ursula Von Der Leyen, President of the European Commission

By Dr Salman Abu Sitta | MEMO

On 29 April 2023

Your Excellency,

You made a speech this week praising the establishment of Israel on its 75th anniversary.

For someone in your position, it is surprising that it had so many errors of fact, misguided judgment, violation of international law, and deviation from basic norms of justice.

You congratulated Israel on 75 years of existence on a land area of 20,500 km2, which is 78% of Palestine. Not one square kilometer of this area is obtained by any legal or just means.  Six percent was obtained through the treacherous British collusion and 72% by military conquest.  How could you congratulate a regime which obtained this land by spilling the blood of the innocent?

Israel has no boundaries, neither by international law nor by its own admission. The Armistice Agreement of 1949 confers no legal title on any boundary. Which Israel are you congratulating? Is it in the land occupied by Israel in 1948, or in 1967?

There is not a single line in UN resolutions that supports you in either.

You congratulate Israel on its “dynamism ingenuity and groundbreaking innovations”.

I ask you if you gather the best German scientists and locate them on Madagascar Island, where they killed the people of the island and set up the best laboratory. Would you consider that a scientific achievement?

Einstein did not discover the Theory of Relativity because he was a Jew or a Swiss; he discovered it because he was a brilliant scientist. To his credit, he refused the idea of Israel and condemned the Jewish massacre of Deir Yassin.

Your European government poured billions of Euros into Israel for “scientific research” under the EU-Israel Association. The agreement contained a clause requiring Israel to abide by Human Rights in the conduct of research. But you, in particular Germany and Holland, waived this clause on demand by Israel.

Your Israel did not waste time. Its arms industry company Elbit sold weapons of mass destruction to many countries, spreading death and destruction in many parts of the world.

The prime victim is our people in Gaza. In four Israel wars against Gaza in the last six years, not only Elbit products were used to kill women and children, but its operators were in the field to guide the Israeli soldiers.

People of good conscience in the UK protested against that and demonstrated against the Elbit factory in England. Similar people in Germany protested against Elbit but your government jailed them.

Is this the Israeli science you celebrate?

You say also “Israel made the desert bloom”. You fell into the trap of Israeli propaganda. With your government capabilities, you could have done a better job.

The area of the southern district is 12,500 km2. Israel irrigated at best 800 km2. The remaining 94% was and is still desert. The irony is that the irrigation water is stolen water from the West Bank and Golan Heights. All the stolen water used in agriculture produces only 1.5% of Israel GDP.

Making “the desert bloom” is a myth. How can this escape you?

You paid for your guilt about atrocities against your Jewish citizens with Palestinian blood. Your leaders flocked to Yad Vashim, erected in Palestine not in Germany, to shed tears and ask for forgiveness. But none of your leaders had the moral courage to look at the opposite hill, 3 km away, at Deir Yassin and confront your hosts, the criminals who committed the massacre there.

You paid no notice or care about the Israeli-run concentration camps and forced labour camps for captured Palestinian civilians in 1948, set up by your citizens who fled to Palestine, only three years after those camps were closed in Germany, even though they were reported by ICRC.

The major defect in your speech is that you did not see the elephant in the room. You did not see or recognize Al Nakba, the worst disaster in Palestine’s 4000 years of history.

You did not mention the Zionist invasion by 120,000 European soldiers in 9 brigades carrying out 31 military operations. This invasion depopulated 560 towns and villages through massacres, making refugees of two-thirds of the Palestinian people.

How can you escape this calamity? Do you not know Palestine?

Go back to maps in the mid-19th century by your geographers Kiepert and Van de Velde. They tell you about 1200 localities in Palestine. You are a fluent French speaker. Go to seven volumes of Victor Guerin describing every village in Palestine.

If you miss all that, you cannot miss the historical visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to Palestinian Jerusalem on 31st October 1898. You cannot miss the voluminous scholarly work of Gustav Dalman about Palestine’s people.

With this knowledge, it is very sad, and indicative of the Western racism, that you voted frequently against Palestinian Inalienable rights in the United Nations, invoking the sordid European history of colonialism.

But it is not too late. You can retract your words and actions and come back to the true path, peace, and justice for Palestinians. They are the true heirs of Jesus Christ, after whom your political party was named.

Yours respectfully,

Dr Salman Abu Sitta

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | 3 Comments

The Aggressors Accuse Russia of ‘Blackmail’ for Defending its Currency, Energy Wealth, and Even Its Existential Security

Strategic Culture Foundation | April 29, 2022

The United States and its NATO and European Union allies have imposed unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia that amount to economic warfare. This warfare has been going on, discernibly, since the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 on the back of allegations of Russian wrongdoing, for example, the alleged annexation of Crimea. It’s the logic of a poacher posing as the gamekeeper.

For eight years, the U.S.-led economic war against Russia has been pursued without relent. The self-professed “exceptional nation” presumes the privileged, exclusive use of economic terrorism against others who do not bend the knee. In hock to its Washington master, the European Union has imposed round after round of restrictions on trade with Russia in full compliance with American orders. The European compliance to self-inflict damage is astounding especially given that the U.S. economy is not as reliant on Russia as the EU’s and therefore has not been impacted as badly, at least not directly. But the presumed American “free lunch” is beginning to change, as our columnist Declan Hayes cogently surveyed this week.

Now that the proxy war against Russia has escalated into “Total War” – the historically sinister phrase used by France’s economy minister Bruno Le Maire – the full nefarious scope of the Western objective has become even more explicit. The U.S. and its NATO partners want to achieve the complete collapse of the Russian economy leading to regime change in Moscow. The eruption of violence in Ukraine following Russia’s military intervention on February 24 is but the opportunity to ramp up the U.S.-led war campaign against Russia.

The explicitly stated objective of cutting off Russia’s vital energy trade and the theft of the country’s foreign monetary reserves can only be interpreted as part of a wider imperial plan to crush the Russian nation, subjugate it and conquer its vast natural wealth.

Eight years of NATO-backed military aggression by the Neo-fascist Kiev regime against Russian-speaking populations has gone hand-in-hand with the installation of U.S. strategic weapons across Europe, including Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles in Germany and biological weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine. The military threat to Russia has been in tandem with the relentless economic warfare from sanctions. In addition, there is the intransigence by the U.S. and its NATO partners to engage with Moscow in resolving security concerns through diplomacy. All of this culminated in the present war in Ukraine. The concerted and rapid imposition of further draconian sanctions on the Russian economy from the blockade on virtually its entire banking system as well as the extreme censorship of Russian international media – all of that indicates that the U.S. and its partners were already on a war footing and ready to escalate hostilities.

In this context, ominously, Ukraine is resembling Bosnia-Herzegovina and the pre-World War One assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a fatal flashpoint.

The reckless flooding of weapons into Ukraine over recent weeks by the United States, NATO, and the European Union is also proof of a premeditated pent-up war agenda. This week, U.S. President Joe Biden is calling for his Congress to release $33 billion in “emergency aid” for Ukraine to “defend against Russian aggression”. This represents a tenfold increase in the record military support that the Biden administration has already plowed into the Kiev regime. This is tantamount to stoking a powder-keg.

The ludicrous, bitter laugh about this is that when Russia seeks to defend itself and Russian-speaking people, then Moscow is accused of “aggression”.

The latest twist in this Western duplicity and rank hypocrisy comes with the accusations that Russia is using “blackmail” by warning it will cut off its prodigious gas supplies to Europe. Moscow has simply and reasonably demanded that all European importers must henceforth pay for their gas supplies in the Russian currency, the ruble, as opposed to dollars or euros. The move was prompted in part because the Western countries had seized Russia’s foreign reserves and have banned most Russian banks from the international payment system. In other words, it is they who have politicized their currencies as weapons. So what is Russia supposed to do? Give away its vast natural gas wealth for free? To countries that are waging an economic war and increasingly a military proxy war against it?

This week, Russia’s state-owned energy industry Gazprom announced it was suspending the supply of gas to Poland and Bulgaria. The two EU and NATO member states had bluntly refused to pay for their vital energy needs in Russian currency. In that case, Russia has the right to withhold the selling of its commodity.

The move to mandate payment for gas in ruble was an essential counter-measure that has succeeded in defending the Russian currency and economy from collapse. That collapse was being deliberately orchestrated by Western sanctions aimed at strangling Russia. And yet when Russia acts to defend its vital existential interests it is accused of using “blackmail”. One of the shrill voices was that of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The former German defense minister is a rabid Russophobe. Her logic of accusing Russia of wrongdoing is like a Third Reich minister lambasting the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as an insolent insurrection.

Von der Leyen and her elite, unelected Brussels bureaucracy are calling for all EU members to refuse payments to Russia. They are effectively endorsing the theft of Russia’s wealth. Their arrogance is not surprising. But that arrogance is leading to rebellion across Europe from the economic damage and unbearable cost-of-living crisis hitting the majority of the EU’s 500 million population. Bulgarian and Polish workers are demanding their governments resume trade with Russia to prevent a crash to their livelihoods.

A further mockery in this absurd scenario is that anti-Russia hawks in the United States and Europe have been vociferously jeering for all energy and other trade with Russia to be cancelled. Of course, this mania is all about propping up U.S. capitalism, hegemony over Europe, the weapons industry, and the transatlantic feeding trough for effete European lackeys.

Then, when Russia cuts off the energy supplies because of non-payment, there is an uproar about Moscow “weaponizing trade”.

The Western accusations of economic blackmail are analogous to perverse claims of military blackmail. The criminally reckless aggression that the United States and its NATO partners have pursued against Russia has escalated into war in Ukraine. As a British government minister demonstrated this week, the NATO powers are now directing their proxy Kiev regime to launch attacks on Russian territory. Yet when Russia warns of the dangerous risks of world war veering into a nuclear conflagration, the Western powers and their dutiful media turn around and accuse Russia of using “nuclear blackmail”.

America and Europe’s dubious political “leadership” is exposing itself as delusional, duplicitous, and criminally insane. They are insanely willing to push the world into a catastrophic war. And when Russia stands up to their madness, it is accused of being a reprobate.

In a funny sort of way, such farcical Western leadership is good. For it only further exposes how utterly unhinged and corrupt the Western elite rulers are in the eyes of their increasingly restive, angry populations.

It is Western callous, sociopathic leaders who are the ones blackmailing their own citizens and indeed the rest of the world. Their ultimatum is: destroy Russia or we will destroy everything. This is the mindset of totalitarianism.

The Western public’s enemy is not Russia, and it’s not China nor Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, or some other designated foreign foe. All our enemy is the Western system of U.S.-led imperialism, its capitalist elite, and their political flunkies like Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen.

April 30, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | 2 Comments