No Hillary, it's Israel not Hamas that violates ceasefires

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In order to get anywhere in the Israel - Palestine debate, there is one thing that must be made clear.

This is not a normal conflict.

Typically when imagery is called to mind of one side "raining down rockets" on the other, the casual reader tends to visualize a traditional somewhat symmetrical conflict. Complete with opposing armies.

Not the struggle of a people under occupation.

We can split hairs about Geneva Four all day long, but those protections are in place to guard against prolonged occupation. If the occupying power is responsible for not only the health and well being of populations - in this case, the roughly 4 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza - and uncontroversially disallowed to annex land and transfer populations, long term occupation would be highly avoided.

Which is precisely the point.

So despite Hillary Clinton's wife-beater-shielding assertion that Israel "does not want this" and the Palestinians and their leaders "incite violence" by playing the aggressor, the record seems to indicate the contrary. With no-one to play the arbiter, Israel can fire into Gaza without accountability, provoke a response and then claim self-defense after using disproportionate force. That is the history.

Because the Palestinians are accountable to Israel and Israel can decimate with impunity using the most powerful state of the art weaponry in the region as explained by Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund.

Munayyer's organization tracked all Israeli ceasefire violations SINCE Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state,  negotiated the end of the 2012 Gaza slaughter known as "Pillar of Defense":

From the 2012 ceasefire Israel violated the [Clinton brokered] agreement 120 times in one year. More importantly, in an analysis of the New York Times' coverage, 87 of these violation were not covered at all. The ones that were, alleged the offensives were made in self-defense.

So how have these cease-fire dynamics been covered? We’ve tracked New York Times coverage of the cease-fire during this period. The New York Times is representative of the mainstream and extremely important for shaping public discourse on events and thus an important window into broader mainstream coverage. The Times also has multiple reporters covering these events including a bureau in Jerusalem and a correspondent in Gaza. Finally, we simply can’t track everything so the Times, with its easily searchable history, is an effective example to use.

Of the nearly 120 Israeli cease-fire violations during this period the New York Times reported on 17 of them. Additionally, most of these stories (eleven) came either during the first week of the cease-fire, when the issue was still fresh in readers’ minds, or since the escalation on December 20th. That means for the bulk of this period, during which Israel committed 87 cease-fire violations and causing some 91 Palestinian casualties over nearly a one year period there were only six stories on the topic. This represents a systematic failure to cover Israeli cease-fire violations.

Israel says it wants Hamas to control projectile fire from other factions and yet it persistently violates the truce putting Hamas in a position of having to defend Israel’s violations. By targeting groups other than Hamas and by expecting Hamas to crack down on their responses, Israel is playing a dangerous and deadly game of divide and conquer in Gaza that will likely lead to the unraveling of the cease-fire. Once again, Israel has proven security is not its aim, subjugation is. 

One more consideration. As if drone assassinations of Hamas leaders and mass incarceration without charge of hundreds of Gazans at will without consequence, both Gaza and the West Bank are to be considered "one" Palestine.

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In fact, the Bill Clinton brokered disastrous Oslo Accords - in which Arafat was manipulated into signing away almost everything but the deed, which he refused to do - stipulated the two areas were to be geographicaly connected.

This vision died when Israel build it's famous "apartheid wall" separating the west bank from Gaza and West Jerusalem from East Jerusalem and settlements have quadrupled since 1993.

Still, the concern remains. With land expropriation and home demolition in the west bank on the rise, a military response from Gaza is warranted under international right of self-defense. What happens to one half of Palestine happens to all of Palestine.

But continued settlement expansion - now complete with some 500,000 specially protected Jews in the West Bank - somehow went unchallenged in the New York debate as they have gone unchallenged by the United States.

Click for "Trigger Happy in the West Bank"

When we look at causal factors in this ongoing destructive conflict, we must not ignore Israeli impunity, whether raiding or bombing Gaza or defying international law by continuing illegal settlement building on land set aside for a free Palestine, as a continued source of instigation.

Clearly Clinton's 2012 negotiated ceasefire between Hamas and Israel - will go down as yet one more success for Israeli foreign policy, one more colossal blunder for US credibility.

Shah of Iran Discusses Israel Lobby influence on US, 36 Years Ago - 60 minutes 1976

Bernie Sanders Did Confuse Numbers of Dead and Wounded in Gaza War, but Israel’s Mass Killing of Civilians Is a Fact

Posted by Sitting Bull on Sunday, April 10, 2016

The worst 'human shield' guide ever made by Israel

The IOF oftentimes, make up Human Shield Manuels and then attribute them to Hamas - poorly. https://t.co/5tgmXbpaex https://t.co/2KyZoVGhng

— Thermite (@OtEasybrown) April 10, 2016

Oh Hillary, please move to Israel and run for the Knesset. You would be better placed to serve your masters. pic.twitter.com/ML2zV4N8Jp

— Thermite (@OtEasybrown) July 7, 2015

Trump foreign policy mirrors nation's own: We do what we want.

It may come as a shock to the Bernie-Bros and Shillary-bots, columnists, foreign policy, political and military experts but, though they may be able to run circles around him in foreign policy theory, the Donald has a clearer grasp of US military practice than any of them.

And he need not bother to "expand" what's on the books. We do what we want.

While punishing pundits and ham-handed hand-holders joined together to gnash their collective teeth in righteous indignation at Trump, a CIA insider reassured us:

Former CIA director Michael Hayden, who also served as a four-star Air Force general and the director of the National Security Agency, sees a remedy: The military would save us from Trump’s excesses if he somehow gets elected. “If any future president wants . . . to waterboard anybody, he better bring his own bucket,” Hayden has said. The Pentagon would never let him get away with war crimes: “The American armed forces would refuse to act,” he told HBO’s Bill Maher recently. “You are required not to follow an unlawful order.” 

Hats off to Maher for not cracking up and sending a cascade of spittle over Mr. Hayden. While you get the sense he would get the irony, Maher is still a "truther" after all, in that he believes the "truth" that Islam is an inherently violent religion  bent on destruction of the west.

Almost 25-years-ago to the day of Trump's latest foreign policy "tough talk", on February 26 and 27, 1991, the White House demonstrated no need to "expand" existing law or even pass bogus legal memos as in the torture fiasco.

For it was on this day the US incinerated tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in a fiery massacre known as the "Highway of Death". The soldiers were withdrawing from Kuwait in compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions.

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles on two major highways in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," said one U.S. pilot. The horror is still there to see.

In short, rather than accept the offer of Iraq to surrender and leave the field of battle, Bush and the U.S. military strategists decided simply to kill as many Iraqis as they possibly could while the chance lasted. 

The pretext for massive extermination of Iraqi soldiers was the desire of the U.S. to destroy Iraqi equipment. But in reality the plan was to prevent Iraqi soldiers from retreating at all. Powell remarked even before the start of the war that Iraqi soldiers knew that they had been sent to Kuwait to die. Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post reasoned that "the noose has been tightened" around Iraqi forces so effectively that "escape is impossible" (February 27, 1991). What all of this amounts to is not a war but a massacre.

The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. Additional war crimes are added for intentionally targeting civilians, of which there were busloads caught up in traffic jam.

But this is just not permissible to say.

Even Rosa Brooks, professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a former Pentagon official, overlooks the forest so shaded is she by the trees. While she is clearly troubled by his comments, she can't quite move the ball past the torture extravaganza at Abu Ghirab, Guantanamo and various other 'black sites' post-911.

Think back to the first few years after the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon initially planned to treat Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners in accordance with the rules laid out in the Geneva Conventions, but the White House considered this inconvenient. (Under those rules, prisoners can’t be detained secretly and with no review process, and they most definitely can’t be waterboarded.) So the White House found some unusually compliant Justice Department lawyers, and by January 2002, the department’s office of legal counsel was instructing the Defense Department that Geneva Convention protections did not apply to Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters.

She is concerned, given the Bush administrations manipulation of "torture memos" - which in effect said what we're doing to captured Al Queda folks isn't torture, therefore it isn't subject to the Geneva Conventions - Trump may do the same thing.

Missing from her post-911 abuse of power critique of Bush is the war crime of invading and bombing Afghanistan at all. We were not attacked nor were we under threat of attack at any time from the sovereign state of Afghanistan. We were not immune to it's charms however, or of our desire to insert ourselves back into that part of the world in a permanent way. All but two of the highjackers were Saudis and none were from Afghanistan.s

US airstrikes in that country, extremely precise "errant" strikes against Doctors Without Borders Hospitals and Saudi led US-weaponized and supported attacks on civilian markets in Yemen are the rule, not the exception. The fact these atrocities and war crimes pass without pause is a testament to our sanctified view of those illegal activities versus the activities of "others."

Or of course we need look no farther than Hillary Clintons favorite war, Iraq III, for which she voted as perhaps the crime of the century. Surpassed only by Hiroshima, Iraq 2003 was a supreme war crime, crime against humanity - more than 1 million Iraqis were killed - and disabused the world of the notion the UN retained any legitimacy whatsoever.

Should I go on? Please. Do your own research and get back to me.

Russian versus US "aggression": Keep Ukraine NATO neutral

Both Bernie Sanders​ AND Hillary Clinton​ share enthusiasm for this amazing feat of creative cold war politic. WTF?

Gen. Philip Breedlove in the Latvian capital Riga come a day after the Pentagon said it would begin continuous rotations of an additional armored brigade of about 4,200 troops in Eastern Europe beginning in early 2017.

“We are prepared to fight and win if we have to ... our focus will expand from assurance to deterrence, including measures that vastly improve our overall readiness,” Breedlove said following talks with Baltic region NATO commanders.

“To the east and north we face a resurgent and aggressive Russia, and as we have continued to witness these last two years, Russia continues to seek to extend its influence on its periphery and beyond.”

Crimea, Ukraine and how "your land is my land, Putin!"

Let's see. This is a country on Russia's border "threatening" to open ties with the EU, effectively "cutting" ties with Mother Russia. Namely and most threateningly, the Ukraine's gesture to join the west's killing apparatus, NATO, might have raised an eyebrow.

Perspective: Imagine if Canada or Mexico were undergoing revolution and threatening to join the Warsaw Pact. Do you think we would tolerate such a thing? Could we be blamed for responding? Are you kidding me? We would nuke Canada into next Winter before we would allow it to join the Warsaw Pact!

Russia, however, was openly hostile to Ukrainian membership in NATO.

Ya think? Given the collective's recent bloody history is it any wonder?

Though a more persuasive case that by far the most concerning global aggressors are the United States and, when cover is warranted,  its NATO lackeys "coalition", such an objective observation comes with and dangerous prerequisite: that we reject the notion "our" aggression serves a greater good, one of "progress" and "democracy" and "civilization" while "theirs" serves the interest of tyranny and conquest.

These are the warmed over Cold War ideologies that continue to permeate the national discussion despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as observed by pretty much the rest of the world.

All told, 24 percent of worldwide respondents chose America as the greatest threat to world peace. Coming in second, with a whopping 8 percent, was Pakistan.

No mention of say, Iraq? The completely "illegal under international law" invasion and subsequent occupation (permanent military bases) to dominate western oil interests in the region.  Libya anyone? How about the West's "non-involved involvement" in Syria?

Both interventions of which among other things, could be deemed part of "the greater Israel project": a series of military interventions sold as, among other things, making sure Israel feels safe in its self-created "bad neighborhood". Israel has dreamed of a "post-Saddam" Iraq for at least 20 years.

Oh, that's right. International Law, like international terror, is something that applies to "them", not "us".

At least Hillary and Bernie are upfront about their NATO bloodlust. Trump so far, is the only one bold or reckless enough to call for dismantling the dangerous Cold War relic.

That means we are protecting them, giving them military protection and other things, and they’re ripping off the United States. And you know what we do? Nothing,” Mr. Trump said at a subdued rally here on the outskirts of Milwaukee. “Either they have to pay up for past deficiencies or they have to get out.” 

“And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO,” he concluded.

From the mouths of babes.

So the only feasible 'win win' situation appears to be quite simple and rather obvious. Ukraine should remain neutral. Advocate ties with the west all day long, just leave the murderous terror affiliation behind, as pitched by Noam Chomsky:

Now, in the case of the Ukraine, again, whatever you think about Putin—think he’s the worst monster since Hitler—they still have a case, and it’s a case that no Russian leader is going to back down from. They cannot accept the Ukrainian move of the current government to join NATO, even probably the European Community. There is a very natural settlement to this issue: a strong declaration that Ukraine will be neutralized, it won’t be part of any military alliance; that, along with some more or less agreed-upon choices about how—about the autonomy of regions. You can finesse it this way and that, but those are the basic terms of a peaceful settlement. But we have to be willing to accept it; otherwise, we’re moving towards a very dangerous situation. I mentioned before that the Doomsday Clock, famous clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has just been advanced to three minutes before midnight. That’s very close. Midnight means we’re finished. That is the highest, closest it’s reached since 1983.

Seems like the surest way to avoid armageddon in this lifetime.

Do you agree with German politician Dr. Alexander Neu?

Dr. Neu also mentioned that it was the West, not Russia that sparked the coup in Ukraine. "I don't see that [Moscow] poses a threat to the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. This is why this threat is imaginary." 

The latest Pentagon's announcement, according to the German politician, could indicate that the US is trying to contain Russia because Moscow does not want to follow what the West wants it to do.

Food for thought.