White House officials and reporters have been going nonstop in recent days about alleged Russian war crimes in the Kyiv suburbs and in Mariupol, and they’ve convinced me. I support the calls for international war crimes investigations of Russian atrocities in the Ukraine, including the launching of this hateful war in February.
But I find such calls by American leaders and the American press hollow given the ample American and Israeli track record of alleged war crimes, which no one in our official culture cares about. No, they shut such investigations down.
It would seem to be an obvious moral observation that: We have no standing to demand such investigations unless we make similar demands on American and Israeli authorities, who have supervised horrors in the Middle East, notably the invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands. “Unprovoked.” Just what they say about Putin and the Ukraine. The only consequences to George Bush was he got shoes thrown at him.
Or take that American drone strike on an Afghan family that killed 10 people as the U.S. was leaving Afghanistan last August. The U.S. lied about the attack, said it was aimed at ISIS, and then called it a “tragic mistake.” And yes, in a spasm of interest, the New York Times investigated some American attacks. Now that’s down the memory hole.
How many tragic mistakes did the U.S. make across Iraq and Libya? How many tragic mistakes has Saudi Arabia made in Yemen using American weaponry in an American war that has caused the deaths of nearly 400,000, most of them children?
I suppose Russia claims it has made some tragic mistakes in the Ukraine. But who is listening to their propaganda right now? We censor that.
Of course my focus is Palestine. You only have to go back 11 months to the 11-day onslaught on Gaza that killed 250 people and included attacks on civilian infrastructure — like the highrise housing the press in Gaza City that collapsed like our World Trade Center. The U.N. Human Rights Council is investigating that war but 68 U.S. senators want that investigation shut down. And we don’t hear Judy Woodruff, Jane Ferguson and Simon Ostrovsky of PBS News Hour, or NBC’s Lester Holt, Richard Engel and Andrea Mitchell cheering on that investigation– when they are all but demanding international investigation of Russia’s attacks. “Humanity demands” action, Woodruff said last night.
The current Defense Minister of Israel, Gantz, ran for prime minister in 2019 bragging that he had bombed Gaza back to the “stone age”. He was taking full credit for the 2014 onslaught that killed 2200 people including 500 children and rubbled the capital. You’d think that Gantz would be a pariah, afraid to step foot in Europe. Yet American politicians meet him and embrace him, including progressive Democrats.
Meantime, a horde of good liberals in the Obama White House worked to prevent Israeli leaders from ever being tried for the Stone Age war– or the one before it, which began when Israel killed hundreds of people at a policy academy graduation ceremony in Gaza on the theory that they were part of Gaza’s security force. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Suzanne Nossel all said there was no problem with that.
Then in 2018, Gazans held weekly protests at the high fence that has kept them in an open-air prison for the last 14 years. They were demanding the right to return to homes and villages from which they or their families had been turned out in 1948-1949. A lot like what all those Ukrainians in Poland and Moldova and Hungary say on TV — we just want to go back to our homes.
Israeli forces at that border fence shot thousands of Palestinians during the protests, killing a couple of hundred, and maiming many more, notably including leg amputations.
I’ve never heard calls for war crimes investigations on the news or from the White House over those slaughtered protesters, armed with slingshots and maybe a molotov cocktail or two.
Meantime, the New York Times ran four op-ed pieces justifying the shooting of those protesters. Here’s an excerpt of one of them.
Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good choices…. Knowledgeable people can debate the best way to deal with this threat. Could a different response have reduced the death toll? Or would a more aggressive response deter further actions of this kind and save lives in the long run? What are the open-fire orders on the India-Pakistan border, for example?
I’m sure the Russians have similar justifications for what they’re doing in Ukraine. And I’m sure The New York Times doesn’t run them on the op-ed page.
The old saying is that charity begins at home. So does piety about violations of the laws of war.
h/t Scott Roth and James North and Donald Johnson.
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To Canada’s everlasting shame, the land on which Beit Nuba, Imwas and Yalu once stood is now, thanks to tax-deductible donations to the Canadian chapter of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), known as “Canada Park,” a recreational area where Israeli Jews frolic and picnic and their government plants trees in the name of Canadians who have provided Israel with financial or other support.
By permitting Israel to convert these occupied lands into “Canada Park” and allowing contributions to the Jewish National Fund to have tax-deductible status, Canada is complicit in a war crime as defined by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.
There should be an independent body that investigates all war crimes no matter who commits them. There isn’t now.
It is pointless expecting any country to investigate itself in a serious way. It will always be a whitewash, except in cases where some government has been overthrown. Then the new one might investigate the old one but even that would not be ideal. The new one might be whitewashing its own crimes coming into power.
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Courtesy of a Canadian friend and speaking of “war crimes,” here’s one that has received scant attention:
Before dawn on June 6, one day after Israel launched the 1967 war,“Three villages in the fertile Latrun Valley [under Jordanian administration in accordance with the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel] that had defied capture in 19 were totally razed by Israeli bulldozers, their residents scattered without concern for their future. Beit Nuba, Imwas [the latter believed by Christians to be where Jesus first appeared after his resurrection] & Yalu lay just across the frontier on the West Bank, about fifteen miles northwest of Jerusalem, & obstructed a direct route from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. The [10,000 or more] residents had been ordered out without explanation, given no chance to rescue their possessions except for what they could carry, left to wander without shelter or food or water.” They were never permitted to return. (Donald Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East in 1967, Amana Books Brattleboro, Vermont, 1988, p. 290)
Even though the inhabitants put up no resistance, the three villages were demolished on the direct orders of Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of Staff of the Israeli army. Several of the villages’ elders who were unable to walk without assistance were killed by falling rubble as Israel’s bulldozers demolished their homes.
What transpired when Israel attacked, seized, ethnically cleansed & demolished the three villages is well documented in “Memory of the Cactus,” a 2008 documentary film directed by Hanna Musleh and produced by the Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq. Dr. Ismail Zayid, now a Canadian and highly respected tireless advocate for his fellow Palestinians, was born in Beit Nuba. CBC Television’s Fifth Estate produced a documentary on Canada Park featuring Dr. Zayid. (cont’d)
PW: “Or take that American drone strike on an Afghan family that killed 10 people as the U.S. was leaving Afghanistan last August. The U.S. lied about the attack, said it was aimed at ISIS, and then called it a “tragic mistake.” And yes, in a spasm of interest, the New York Times investigated some American attacks. Now that’s down the memory hole.”
We never, ever saw any footage of the dead bodies, children’s bodies endlessly shown on our TV screens. Not once, let alone like the dead in Ukraine, which are completely horrifying.
War crimes and crimes against humanity not created equal. Not in the international community, definitely not in the U.S Who controls the evidence, the images we see and don’t see often determines the outrage.
MSNBC, CNN, FOX etc never showed images of the people in Iraq the U.S. killed, Never show images of the dead in Yemen that Saudi Arabia has killed. Never showed any images of the dead in Gaza that Israel etc etc
Then we have the likes of Nicole “I don’t care what we do”: Wallace feigning tears about children in Ukraine demanding International investigations into Putin’s war crimes, while in the past she assisted the Bush administration in pushing their “unprovoked” war in Iraq. She persistently interrupts in this clip. Gets her opinion out, does not allow Howard Dean to do the same. Now this complicit in the invasion of Iraq makes millions as a host on MSNBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOyMIcplMhQ
Iraq war hawks Bill Kristol a regular on Ari Melber’s, David Frum also a regular guest on MSNBC programs
“White House officials and reporters have been going nonstop in recent days about alleged Russian war crimes in the Kyiv suburbs and in Mariupol, and they’ve convinced me. I support the calls for international war crimes investigations of Russian atrocities in the Ukraine,”
But not international investigations of Ukrainian war crimes? There are plenty of allegations of those.
In the meantime, best to remember that the stories about the Russian war crimes are being brought to you by the people who told you about Saddam’s WMDs and Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators.
They are the same people who reject the “apartheid” label for Israel.