Mas 777 Down

[Guest longtimer]

Hamas was ELECTED in 2006 by a majority. The won 74 of the 132 and took 44.45 % of the vote. Hamas was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and was elected on a platform of Death to Israel, and support of terrorism to gain their voice.

The innocents referred to are those who didn't vote for them, or those who were too young to vote. There are definitely though, a huge portion of the population who are directly responsible for the "hell" they find themselves in.

indiscriminate killing of civilians is still WRONG no matter which side you are on./

[DEFCON]

I have a counter-point longtimer. Innocent civilians support the soldier at war by providing everything from shelter and medical care to food, weapons and even cover. Other than the kids, I don't think there are too many true innocents in war.

[Guest longtimer]

I have a counter-point longtimer. Innocent civilians support the soldier at war by providing everything from shelter and medical care to food, weapons and even cover. Other than the kids, I don't think there are too many true innocents in war.

but those innocent civilians most often have no option but to provide. Unarmed (lightly armed) vs over armed (military weapons).

[acsidestick]

http://israelipalestinian.procon.org/view.additional-resource.php?resourceID=000646

This is a link to the very scary 2006 Hamas election platform. It is almost entirely about murder, violence, terrorism, suicide bombers, and rewarding the families of suicide murder terrorists. More than 46% said "You ready----You ready--- let's get it on!" I have to give credit to Hamas, they are one of the only political parties doing exactly what they were elected to do. They are bringing war and death to their own people who voted for the cause of violence.

[W5]

Map of a Tragedy

The Wall Street Journal catalogued and mapped some of the debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which fell across three Ukrainian villages after the Boeing 777 was brought down on July 17, allegedly by a surface-to-air missile.

http://graphics.wsj.com/mh17-crash-map/

[UpperDeck]

http://israelipalestinian.procon.org/view.additional-resource.php?resourceID=000646

This is a link to the very scary 2006 Hamas election platform. It is almost entirely about murder, violence, terrorism, suicide bombers, and rewarding the families of suicide murder terrorists. More than 46% said "You ready----You ready--- let's get it on!" I have to give credit to Hamas, they are one of the only political parties doing exactly what they were elected to do. They are bringing war and death to their own people who voted for the cause of violence.

I'm guessing you're not of the muslim faith and don't socialize with Palestinians. You appear to have a VERY "black and white" perspective and nuances are irrelevant.

Consider--just for a moment---that this latest imbroglio followed Israel's punishment of ALL Gaza residents for the unattributed (but Hamas suspected) death of three Israeli teens. Hundreds of Palestinians were arbitrarily imprisoned without recourse. Those imprisoned included a deputy leader widely recognized as instrumental in peace efforts.

Remember---no recourse. No habeas corpus; no certiorari; no recourse; at the mere whim of the Israeli government. The Nazis used to do the same in villages where members of the French Resistance were suspected to be harboured.

Hamas responded to these imprisonments in the very limited way available.

I presume you have noted indiscriminate shelling by Israel of hospitals, schools; ambulances with resulting deaths of women and children---the innocents.

And of course---the easy explanation---the patently false justification--is the need of Israel to defend itself against "terrorists".

Just exactly who are the "terrorists"----the Palestinians fighting in almost futility for their right of existence or the Israel army who can't even now seriously contend that they are bombing for the preservation of Israel?

I'm guessing that our sympathies do not lie on the same side of the line.

[blues deville]

Map of a Tragedy

The Wall Street Journal catalogued and mapped some of the debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which fell across three Ukrainian villages after the Boeing 777 was brought down on July 17, allegedly by a surface-to-air missile.

http://graphics.wsj.com/mh17-crash-map/

It appears photographers had no difficulties getting onto the crash site (crime scene) however government crash investigators were delayed or denied access.

[acsidestick]

UpperDeck, I refer to anyone who voted for Hamas as getting exactly what they wanted. If Hamilton sent several thousand rockets raining down on Toronto, I'm pretty sure people in Toronto aren't going to sit back and say "ohhh fireworks!". At some point they will retaliate to the level needed to stop the attacks. I can't believe people who think they should just sit still and die. Israel has given many opportunities to cease, but Hamas simply reloads.

In your statement, you mention innocent women and children. That is quite a blanket statement. Are you saying there are no innocent men? Are you saying there are no bloodthirsty women? What you are saying is absurd. Several thousand purchased, dug in, aimed rockets just happened to coincide with three Israeli teens being killed. Did the three Israelis get killed, then Hamas ran out and purchased several thousand rockets and began digging tunnels.

Wake Up. Hamas has been getting this OFFENSIVE ready for years. They were elected to do so, and they are following through. In the City State of Gaza, where exactly can they fire their rockets from except buildings? Where there are open fields and areas, they do not show any launchers. They like them right next to the citizenship where the most casualties will occur. The Israelis then blow up the building to destroy the launchers. The Gaza citizen who is happy to be used as a human shield ought not be surprised when a shell knocks down their apartment. The lack of civility here is not Israel, but Gaza. So long as Hamas treats it's citizens as Al Jezeera cannon fodder, Women, Children, AND MEN will die. I do agree, that if the Israelis could figure out how to hit only the 47% of adults who voted for Hamas, that would be great! Please forward your ideas to Hamas.

You wonder who the terrorists are? Wow, are you just trolling or do that seriously out of touch with reality. The right to existence is not a Palestinian issue. If they stop the rockets, Israel will stop. Hamas started firing rockets and then like infants seemed indignant that Israel would start firing rockets back (as in I can't can't believe it, I started shooting rockets over their to kill them, and now they are firing back, I just can't understand why they would shoot BACK)

This is the Crux of the matter. Israel is shooting BACK.

The only group who is actually fighting for existence are the ones who have been told they will be driven into the sea and drowned as a nation by the constitution of Hamas.

http://www.prageruniversity.com/Political-Science/Middle-East-Problem.html#.U9nFdmK9KSP

Here is a little 5 minute tutorial on the Middle East. The author is definitely on Israel side and a b'nai brith advocate. That doesn't mean this video isn't accurate.

One last thing. You mentioned the innocent women and children (and men)in Gaza. Do you believe there are innocent women and children (and men) in Israel, or are they getting what they deserve?

[UpperDeck]

The right to existence is not a Palestinian issue. If they stop the rockets, Israel will stop.

One last thing. You mentioned the innocent women and children (and men)in Gaza. Do you believe there are innocent women and children (and men) in Israel, or are they getting what they deserve?

I wouldn't even attempt to sway you from your opinion. Let just point out that the rockets----the almost useless Hamas rockets---are all that they have to resist the Israeli encroachments upon and denial of basic human rights. Israel will not stop. It has breached almost every undertaking it has given to peace-makers. The international community seems essentially powerless but that should be read as "not highly motivated". Those settlements so many complain about? Are they irrelevant? Do you intend to say that if the Palestinians would simply leave, they'd be okay? Oh---wait. They'd have to have a travel permit----and Israel grants few of those. You did know that, right? Freedom of movement is something that you can take for granted; not a Gaza resident.

It offends me to my soul that Israel "warned" civilians to vacate their neighborhoods and seek refuge because the army was about to destroy their homes. The Israelis then bombed the refuge. And since the people can't leave Gaza without that special permit---where else did they have to go?

Do I believe that every Israeli supports the actions of their government? Of course not. I support the Conservative Party on many issues---but I do NOT support the unswerving commitment of Harper to the Israeli government cause. Civilians simply struggling to maintain an existence who care little about another's religious creed don't deserve mutilation (Palestinians) nor should one even endure the unlikely event of being struck by falling shrapnel resulting from "the dome" (Israelis).

And yes---I agree---I should have referenced innocent men, women and children. None should have to endure what they are suffering through and for clarity, by "innocent", I mean not taking up arms.

[DEFCON]

I'd like to know why Israel is able to retain and let its people occupy the Golan Heights when it clearly is Syrian land? I'd like to know why Israel feels it's entitled to build settlements on disputed lands and I'd like to know why the Israelis feel they can continue to thumb their noses at inconvenient UN Resolutions for as long it likes without sanctions, or worse being levelled against it by the US?

On the other side, I have a lot of difficulty with the notion that the Hamas and followers seem to believe they should be able to shoot rockets into another Country and expect there'll be no response? If the Palestinian zone is so unstable politically that fear of Hamas prevents the people from taking action to stop someone from placing a rocket launching system in their neighbourhood knowing that you, your house, your kids and pets won't likely exist in very short order, is really sad.

[Don Hudson]

The following is a lengthy and complex read.

But then, the Middle East cannot be summarized in five minutes, dot-point answers or slogans from either side.

Agree or not, the following deserves a considered read for it's challenging and thought-provoking approach to a problem that dates from 1946/47.

Chomsky has never taken sides and does not reserve heavy criticism only for the United States and Israel. The point of UN resolutions has already been raised and the only comment is with regard to the "ineffectiveness of the U.N.", without further examination of why.

Michael Albert is editor of ZNet and Z Magazine, a long-time online and published journal. I think Edward Said, no longer with us, should be mentioned as well. He was a keen and strong observer of this continuing conflict and has also written extensively and is well worth readining or at least consulting on this terrible subject.

There are other numerous observers worth reading if only for their perspective and not always for their argument. Chomsky is one such observer, Said another.

Michael Albert (ZNet) and Noam Chomsky on Gaza

(http://zcomm.org/sendpress/eyJpZCI6NzMwNzA5LCJ2aWV3IjoiZW1haWwifQ/)

Plus a note on Telesur English

Hello,

A considerable part of our daily coverage of events and relations is currently devoted to Gaza. Below are two recent pieces. A short personal piece by Michael Albert. And a full length discussion by Noam Chomsky.

We hope these help with understanding, and with prodding effective activism. And likewise for the rest of our material on that topic, and others.

You may have noticed, in other news, that there have been many essays on ZNet coming from Telesur English. This is a new project, discussed in an interview with Greg Wilpert, who is heading is up, available on ZNet. I am also involved with the project, responsible for amassing and delivering sixty Opinion Pieces a month, two per day, for the site.

Killing "Snakes" and Self

By Michael Albert

“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.” - Ayelet Shaked, Member of Israeli Parliament

I am Jewish but that identity doesn’t define me. I was Bar Mitzvah-ed, but that day ended my religious connection. I parroted some memorized Hebrew, but I certainly couldn’t understand it. I celebrated but only because I had too. Family and all.

More, once, and only once, before or since, have I directly, personally, encountered outright anti Semitism. A parent of someone I was dating flippantly said something about Jews controlling the world and I nearly assaulted him. I do not have a lot of patience for racism in any context, but I was surprised that his idiotic verbiage set me off as much as it did. It wasn’t blood ties, and it certainly wasn’t religious beliefs that spurred my reaction. So I guess saying the Four Questions a few times as a kid may have had some modest cultural impact.

Does some residue of my childhood tangential Jewish involvement, perhaps having liked Rabbi Schankman of Temple Israel up to my becoming thirteen, cause me, now, to feel just a bit more aggressively outraged and nauseated by the current events in Gaza then if I hadn’t been to Temple a few times? I have no idea, but I don’t think it matters. What does matter is the absolute, unmitigated horror that is now occurring in Gaza. Yet, there are so many horrors. Can words situate this one in the evil hall of fame?

Corpses? Yes. Plenty of corpses are piling up. Broken buildings? Yes. Rubble is waste high and climbing.

When I was becoming adult, violence was Vietnam. In the midst of that, I wondered how humans who had enjoyed even modest personal freedom and development, rather than, say, being beat up and caged as kids and denied education and culture, could be even a fraction as cynical and delusional as my own government was.

But while “destroying the City to Save it” set an incredibly high standard for vile rationalization – I can’t help but notice the “to save it” part of the phrase. In those days, and even more so since the movements of those days had their effects, if nothing else, to perpetrate vile actions in pursuit of reasons of state or reasons of profit required aggressive claims of high motives. Yet, for the Israelis, this no longer seems true.

Yes, for international consumption they fabricate idiotic justifications – mainly they say this is our defense against them defending themselves. And, just to be clear, to those who say that Israel has a right to defend itself, there is only one correct answer. Yes. It does.

And what that means is to escape being attacked by the occupied, Israel can leave Gaza, cease the occupation, cease the racism. That is the only legitimate way for an occupying force – anywhere, anytime – to defend itself against the colonized. Stop perpetrating the crime. There is no warrant for an occupier to get violent. That is just more crime. The solution is to get out.

If you don’t understand that, think of it this way. Imagine the British who were in the U.S. fighting the colonists saying, hey – we have a right to defend ourselves. The reply ought to have been: yes, you do, and your right to do so sanctifies your leaving, but not your shooting us.

Or how about the Nazi in France, or perhaps a better analogy is the Nazi in Poland – in Warsaw. Imagine they said, hey, we have a right to defend ourselves. Again, the reply ought to have been, yes, you do, and that right sanctifies your leaving, but not your obliterating our lives, culture, and constructions.

Ditto for the U.S. in Indochina and a long list of other places. And ditto for Israel in Gaza. Defend yourselves, by all means, sure, and to do so, get out.

But that isn’t my real point in this little rant. Rather, I want to note something new about the events, perhaps worth a few words. It is that the Israelis seem quite content, certainly for domestic consumption and to a degree even internationally, to make no bones about what they are doing.

Knock knock – goes the small missile rap on the roof. Boom goes the hospital underneath shortly later. No worry, just “dead snake” patients and their dead snake doctors.

Ring ring goes the phone. Rubble goes the home. No worry. Just dead snake kids and their dead snake mothers. Another snake habitat reduced to ash. Hooray.

Okay, this is obviously barbaric. If you can’t see that, I don’t know how to better communicate with you about it. But the thing is that these “warnings” also may seem to you insane. It isn’t just the vile cynicism of telling people to get out when the only place they can go is a place that is likely next on the target list. The warnings also make totally evident, and utterly undeniable, what most countries try to hide, or to not be guilty of in better cases.

That is, the knocking to announce what is coming makes totally evident that the Israelis are not hitting houses and hospitals and the rest of Gaza’s life and achievement by accident, but intentionally. The knocking first says, we can hit whatever we want, down to small homes, whenever we want, down to the minute. They are literally saying, here, look at what we did. See the kids shattered and shredded? See the hospital made into ash? See the power plant shooting only flames into the surroundings? See the school, the mosque, the park, the beach, the water sources all covered in rubble and torn flesh? What you see is precisely what we intended to do. There is no collateral damage. There is just intended damage. We Israelis actually want to kill whatever moves. And we want to tell those still moving when we are done that we did it, willfully. We know how to communicate!

When I was in High School I used to stay up nights, sometimes, trying to understand how someone could become a good German. How could people go about daily life while their country engaged in hellish infernal injustice – in that case, the ovens. But I understood in time. The pressure of wanting to get by, of wanting to fit and of not thinking there was any alternative, and, for even more people, the bliss of ignorance (well guarded by asking few if any questions), and, for even more people, literally ignorant fear and intentionaly stirred up desire for revenge, did the trick. And I saw it all in the U.S., during the Indochina campaigns, and regarding the history of racism, and now too, as we destroy the environment. So I get that.

But then there are the storm troopers. The Brownshirts. This is harder to explain. I used to think maybe it was something about the German language – I knew they didn’t have different DNA but they did, after all, talk different. And then I learned that the training that produces soldiers, and to only a slightly lesser extent the education that produces adults, is precisely about obliterating human judgment and sentiment. And that many succumb. And so now we have Israelis. And the capacity for self delusion and ugly denial and even aggressive and fascistic purpose, in the broad population – even if they didn’t constantly claim to have deep and special understanding of the ills of racism – is truly remarkable. Truly sad. Truly enraging.

Even as I cry for Palestine’s pain and hope they prevail, part of me also wonders, when the dust clears, what the hell are the Israelis who are urging incinerating Palestine and Palestinians going to tell themselves so they can live with themselves? The corpses that look so human were really snakes? Or that I was, at least for a time, a monster? And what will they tell their kids? In order to live with their kids. And for their kids not to become monsters – one hopes.

And arguably even more so, what are the Americans with a disgusting past of supporting this horror going to tell themselves? And to tell their kids? And I fear the answer may be nothing at all. Because the ash can of history – which is CNN and the New York Times – may lug away culpability and truth by way of the sewage that is their reporting.

Outrage

By Noam Chomsky

Almost every day brings news of awful crimes, but some are so heinous, so horrendous and malicious, that they dwarf all else. One of those rare events took place on July 17, when Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down in Eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people.

The Guardian of Virtue in the White House denounced it as an “outrage of unspeakable proportions,” which he attributed to “Russian support.” His UN Ambassador thundered that “when 298 civilians are killed” in the “horrific downing” of a civilian plane, “we must stop at nothing to determine who is responsible and to bring them to justice.” She also called on Putin to end his shameful efforts to evade his very clear responsibility.

True, the “irritating little man” with the “ratlike face” (Timothy Garton Ash) had called for an independent investigation, but that could only have been because of sanctions from the one country courageous enough to impose them, the United States, while Europeans had cowered in fear.

On CNN, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor assured the world that the irritating little man “is clearly responsible…for the shoot down of this airliner.” For weeks, lead stories reported on the anguish of the families, the lives of the murdered victims, the international efforts to claim the bodies, the fury over the horrific crime that “stunned the world,” as the press reported daily in grisly detail.

Every literate person, and certainly every editor and commentator, instantly recalled another case when a plane was shot down with comparable loss of life: Iran Air 655 with 290 killed, including 66 children, shot down in Iranian airspace in a clearly identified commercial air route. The crime was not carried out “with U.S. support,” nor has its agent ever been uncertain. It was the guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes, operating in Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.

The commander of a nearby U.S. vessel, David Carlson, wrote in the U.S. Naval Proceedings that he “wondered aloud in disbelief” as “’The Vincennes announced her intentions” to attack what was clearly a civilian aircraft. He speculated that “Robo Cruiser,” as the Vincennes was called because of its aggressive behavior, “felt a need to prove the viability of Aegis (the sophisticated anti-aircraft system on the cruiser) in the Persian Gulf, and that they hankered for the opportunity to show their stuff.”

Two years later, the commander of the Vincennes and the officer in charge of anti-air warfare were given the Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” and for the “calm and professional atmosphere” during the period of the destruction of the Iranian Airbus, which was not mentioned in the award.

President Reagan blamed the Iranians and defended the actions of the warship, which “followed standing orders and widely publicized procedures, firing to protect itself against possible attack.” His successor, Bush I, proclaimed that “I will never apologize for the United States — I don’t care what the facts are… I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”

No evasions of responsibility here, unlike the barbarians in the East.

There was little reaction at the time: no outrage, no desperate search for victims, no passionate denunciations of those responsible, no eloquent laments by the US Ambassador to the UN about the “immense and heart-wrenching loss” when the airliner was downed. Iranian condemnations were occasionally noted, but dismissed as “boilerplate attacks on the United States” (Philip Shenon, New York Times).

Small wonder, then, that this insignificant earlier event merited only a few scattered words in the US media during the vast furor over a real crime, in which the demonic enemy might have been indirectly involved.

One exception was in the London Daily Mail, where Dominick Lawson wrote that although “Putin’s apologists” might bring up the Iran Air attack, the comparison actually demonstrates our high moral values as contrasted with the miserable Russians, who try to evade their responsibility for MH 17 with lies while Washington at once announced that the US warship had shot down the Iranian aircraft — righteously. What more powerful evidence could there be of our nobility and their depravity?

We know why Ukrainians and Russians are in their own countries, but one might ask what exactly the Vincennes was doing in Iranian waters. The answer is simple. It was defending Washington’s great friend Saddam Hussein in his murderous aggression against Iran. For the victims, the shoot-down was no small matter. It was a major factor in Iran’s recognition that it could not fight on any longer, according to historian Dilip Hiro.

It is worth remembering the extent of Washington’s devotion to its friend Saddam. Reagan removed him from the terrorist list so that aid could be sent to expedite his assault on Iran, and later denied his terrible crimes against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons, blocking congressional condemnations. He also accorded Saddam a privilege otherwise granted only to Israel: there was no serious reaction when Iraq attacked the USS Stark with missiles, killing 37 crewmen, much like the case of the USS Liberty, attacked repeatedly by Israeli jets and torpedo ships in 1967, killing 34 crewmen.

Reagan’s successor, Bush I, went on to provide further aid to Saddam, badly needed after the war with Iran that he launched. Bush also invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to come to the US for advanced training in weapons production. In April 1990, Bush dispatched a high-level Senate delegation, led by future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, to convey his warm regards to his friend Saddam and to assure him that he should disregard irresponsible criticism from the “haughty and pampered press,” and that such miscreants had been removed from Voice of America. The fawning before Saddam continued until he turned into a new Hitler a few months later by disobeying orders, or perhaps misunderstanding them, and invading Kuwait, with illuminating consequences that are worth reviewing once again, though I will leave this interesting matter aside here.

Other precedents had long since been dismissed to the memory hole as without significance. One example is the Libyan civilian airliner that was lost in a sandstorm in 1973 when it was shot down by US-supplied Israeli jets, two minutes flight time from Cairo, towards which it was heading. The death toll was only 110 that time. Israel blamed the French pilot, with the endorsement of the New York Times, which added that the Israeli act was “at worst…an act of callousness that not even the savagery of previous Arab actions can excuse.” The incident was passed over quickly in the United States, with little criticism. When Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir arrived in the US four days later, she faced few embarrassing questions and returned home with new gifts of military aircraft.

The reaction was much the same when Washington’s favored Angolan terrorist organization UNITA claimed to have shot down two civilian airliners at the same time, among other cases.

Returning to the sole authentic and truly horrific crime, the New York Times reported that American UN ambassador Samantha Power “choked up as she spoke of infants who perished in the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine [and] The Dutch foreign minister, Frans Timmermans, could barely contain his anger as he recalled seeing pictures of `thugs’ snatching wedding bands off the fingers of the victims.”

At the same session, the report continues, there was also “a long recitation of names and ages — all belonging to children killed in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza.” The only reported reaction was by Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour, who “grew quiet in the middle of” the recitation.

The Israeli attack on Gaza in July did, however, elicit outrage in Washington. President Obama “reiterated his `strong condemnation’ of rocket and tunnel attacks against Israel by the militant group Hamas,” The Hill reported. He “also expressed ‘growing concern’ about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza,” but without condemnation. The Senate filled that gap, voting unanimously to support Israeli actions in Gaza while condemning “the unprovoked rocket fire at Israel” by Hamas and calling on “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the unity governing arrangement with Hamas and condemn the attacks on Israel.”

As for Congress, perhaps it’s enough to join the 80% of the public who disapprove of their performance, though the word “disapprove” is rather too mild in this case. But in Obama’s defense, it may be that he has no idea what Israel is doing in Gaza with the weapons that he is kind enough to supply to them. After all, he relies on US intelligence, which may be too busy collecting phone calls and email messages of citizens to pay much attention to such marginalia. It may be useful, then, to review what we all should know.

Israel’s goal had long been a simple one: quiet-for-quiet, a return to the norm (though now it may demand even more). What then is the norm?

For the West Bank, the norm has been that Israel carries forward its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value to it, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to intense repression and violence.

For the past 14 years, the norm has been that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week. The latest Israeli rampage was set of by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys were shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited no attention, which is understandable, since it is routine. “The institutionalised disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence,” the respected Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”

Quiet-for-quiet has also enabled Israel to carry forward its program of separating Gaza from the West Bank. That program has been pursued vigorously, always with US support, ever since the US and Israel accepted the Oslo accords, which declare the two regions to be an inseparable territorial unity. A look at the map explains the rationale. Gaza provides Palestine’s only access to the outside world, so once the two are separated, any autonomy that Israel might grant to Palestinians in the West Bank would leave them effectively imprisoned between hostile states, Israel and Jordan. The imprisonment will become even more severe as Israel continues its systematic program of expelling Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and constructing Israeli settlements there, enjoying quiet-for-quiet.

The norm in Gaza was described in detail by the heroic Norwegian trauma surgeon Mads Gilbert, who has worked in Gaza’s main hospital through Israel’s most grotesque crimes and returned again for the current onslaught. In June 2014, immediately before the latest Israeli onslaught, he submitted a report on the Gaza health sector to UNRWA, the UN Agency that tries desperately, on a shoestring, to care for refugees.

“At least 57 % of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 % are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reports. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 % of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that is becoming even worse as Israel again attacks water and sewage systems, leaving over a million people with even more severe disruption of the barest necessity of life.

Gilbert reports that “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage. Prevalence of anaemia in children <2yrs in Gaza is at 72.8%, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3%, 31.4%, 31.45% respectively.” And it gets worse as the report proceeds.

The distinguished human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, who has remained in Gaza through years of Israeli brutality and terror, reports that “The most common sentence I heard when people began to talk about ceasefire: everybody says it’s better for all of us to die and not go back to the situation we used to have before this war. We don’t want that again. We have no dignity, no pride; we are just soft targets, and we are very cheap. Either this situation really improves or it is better to just die. I am talking about intellectuals, academics, ordinary people: everybody is saying that.”

Similar sentiments have been widely voiced: it is better to die with dignity than to be slowly strangled by the torturer.

For Gaza, the plans for the norm were explained forthrightly by Dov Weissglass, a confidant of Ariel Sharon, the person who negotiated the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005. Hailed as a grand gesture in Israel and among acolytes and the deluded elsewhere, the withdrawal was in reality a carefully staged “national trauma,” properly ridiculed by informed Israeli commentators, among them Israel’s leading sociologist, the late Baruch Kimmerling.

What actually happened is that Israeli hawks, led by Sharon, realized that it made good sense to transfer the illegal settlers from their subsidized communities in devastated Gaza, where they were sustained at exorbitant cost, to subsidized settlements in the other occupied territories, which Israel intends to keep. But instead of simply transferring them, as would have been simple enough, it was clearly more useful to present the world with images of little children pleading with soldiers not to destroy their homes, amidst cries of “Never Again,” with the implication obvious. What made the farce even more transparent was that it was a replica of the staged trauma when Israel had to evacuate the Egyptian Sinai in 1982. But it played very well for the intended audience at home and abroad.

Weissglass provided his own description of the transfer of settlers from Gaza to other occupied territories: “What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that [the major settlement blocs in the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns” – but a special kind of Finns, who would quietly accept rule by a foreign power. “The significance is the freezing of the political process,” Weissglass continued. “And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush's] authority and permission and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Weisglass explained further that Gazans would remain “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger” – which would not help Israel’s fading reputation. With their vaunted technical efficiency, Israeli experts determined precisely how many calories a day Gazans needed for bare survival, while also depriving them of medicines and other means of decent life. Israeli military forces confined them by land, sea and air to what British Prime Minister David Cameron accurately described as a prison camp. The Israeli withdrawal left Israel in total control of Gaza, hence the occupying power under international law. And to close the prison walls even more tightly, Israel excluded Palestinians from a large region along the border, including a third or more of Gaza’s scarce arable land. The justification is security for Israelis, which could be just as well achieved by establishing the security zone on the Israeli side of the border, or more fully, by ending the savage siege and other punishments.

The official story is that after Israel graciously handed Gaza over to the Palestinians, in the hope that they would construct a flourishing state, they revealed their true nature by subjecting Israel to unremitting rocket attack and forcing the captive population to become martyrs to so that Israel would be pictured in a bad light. Reality is rather different.

A few weeks after Israeli troops withdrew, leaving the occupation intact, Palestinians committed a major crime. In January 2006, they voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of the Parliament to Hamas. The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In reality, its leaders have repeatedly made it clear and explicit that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the US and Israel for 40 years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment.

True, Israel accepted the Road Map for reaching a two-state settlement initiated by President Bush and adopted by the Quartet that is to supervise it: the US, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia. But as he accepted the Road Map, Prime Minister Sharon at once added fourteen reservations that effectively nullify it. The facts were known to activists, but revealed to the general public for the first time in Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.” They remain under wraps in media reporting and commentary.

The (unrevised) 1999 platform of Israel’s governing party, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud, “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” And for those who like to obsess about meaningless charters, the core component of Likud, Menahem Begin’s Herut, has yet to abandon its founding doctrine that the territory on both sides of the Jordan is part of the Land of Israel.

The crime of the Palestinians in January 2006 was punished at once. The US and Israel, with Europe shamefully trailing behind, imposed harsh sanctions on the errant population and Israel stepped up its violence. By June, when the attacks sharply escalated, Israel had already fired more than 7700 [155 mm] shells at northern Gaza.

The US and Israel quickly initiated plans for a military coup to overthrow the elected government. When Hamas had the effrontery to foil the plans, the Israeli assaults and the siege became far more severe, justified by the claim that Hamas had taken over the Gaza Strip by force – which is not entirely false, though something rather crucial is omitted.

There should be no need to review again the horrendous record since. The relentless siege and savage attacks are punctuated by episodes of “mowing the lawn,” to borrow Israel’s cheery expression for its periodic exercises of shooting fish in a pond in what it calls a “war of defense.” Once the lawn is mowed and the desperate population seeks to reconstruct somehow from the devastation and the murders, there is a cease-fire agreement. These have been regularly observed by Hamas, as Israel concedes, until Israel violates them with renewed violence.

The most recent cease-fire was established after Israel’s October 2012 assault. Though Israel maintained its devastating siege, Hamas observed the cease-fire, as Israeli officials concede. Matters changed in June, when Fatah and Hamas forged a unity agreement, which established a new government of technocrats that had no Hamas participation and accepted all of the demands of the Quartet. Israel was naturally furious, even more so when even the US joined in signaling approval. The unity agreement not only undercuts Israel’s claim that it cannot negotiate with a divided Palestine, but also threatens the long term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank and pursuing its destructive policies in both of the regions.

Something had to be done, and an occasion arose shortly after, when the three Israeli boys were murdered in the West Bank. The Netanyahu government knew at once that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank, targeting Hamas. Netanhayu claimed to have certain knowledge that Hamas was responsible. That too was a lie, as recognized early on. There has been no pretense of presenting evidence. One of Israel’s leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi Eldar, reported almost at once that the killers very likely came from a dissident clan in Hebron that has long been a thorn in the side of Hamas. Eldar added that “I’m sure they didn’t get any green light from the leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act.” The Israeli police have since been searching for two members of the clan, still claiming, without evidence, that they are “Hamas terrorists.”

The 18-day rampage however did succeed in undermining the feared unity government, and sharply increasing Israeli repression. According to Israeli military sources, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed six Palestinians, also searching thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000. Israel also conducted dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing 5 Hamas members on July 7.

Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in 19 months, Israeli officials reported, providing Israel with the pretext for Operation Protective Edge on July 8.

There has been ample reporting of the exploits of the self-declared Most Moral Army in the World, which should receive the Nobel Peace Prize according to Israel’s Ambassador to the US. By the end of July, some 1500 Palestinians had been killed, exceeding the toll of the Cast Lead crimes of 2008-9, 70% of them civilians including hundreds of women and children. And 3 civilians in Israel. Large areas of Gaza had been turned into rubble. During brief bombing pauses, relatives desperately seek shattered bodies or household items in the ruins of homes. The main power plant was attacked – not for the first time; this is an Israeli specialty — sharply curtailing the already very limited electricity and worse yet, reducing still further the minimal availability of fresh water. Another war crime. Meanwhile rescue teams and ambulances are repeatedly attacked. As atrocities mount throughout Gaza, Israel claims that its goal is to destroy tunnels at the border.

Four hospitals had been attacked, each yet another war crime. The first was the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, attacked on the day the ground forces invaded the prison. A few lines in the New York Times, within a story about the ground invasion, reported that “most but not all of the 17 patients and 25 doctors and nurses were evacuated before the electricity was cut and heavy bombardments nearly destroyed the building, doctors said. `We evacuated them under fire,’ said Dr. Ali Abu Ryala, a hospital spokesman. `Nurses and doctors had to carry the patients on their backs, some of them falling off the stairway. There is an unprecedented state of panic in the hospital’.”

Three working hospitals were then attacked, patients and staff left to their own devices to survive. One Israeli crime did receive wide condemnation: the attack on a UN school that was harboring 3300 terrified refugees who had fled the ruins of their neighborhoods on the orders of the Israeli army. The outraged UNWRA Commission-General Pierre Kraehenbuehl said “I condemn in the strongest possible terms this serious violation of international law by Israeli forces…. Today the world stands disgraced.” There were at least three Israeli strikes at the refugee shelter, a site well known to the Israeli army. “The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection,” Kraehenbuehl said, “the last being at ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling.”

The attack was also condemned “in the strongest possible terms” by the normally reticent Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-moon. “Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children,” he said. There is no record that the US Ambassador to the UN “choked up as she spoke of infants who perished” in the Israeli strike – or in the attack on Gaza altogether.

But White House spokesperson Bernadette Meehan did respond. She said that “We are extremely concerned that thousands of internally displaced Palestinians who have been called on by the Israeli military to evacuate their homes are not safe in UN designated shelters in Gaza. We also condemn those responsible for hiding weapons in United Nations facilities in Gaza,” she added, omitting to mention that these facilities were empty and that the weapons were found by UNRWA, who had condemned those who hid them.

Later, the administration joined in stronger condemnations of this particular crime – while at the same time releasing more weapons to Israel. In doing so, however, Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren told reporters. “And it’s become clear that the Israelis need to do more to live up to their very high standards … for protecting civilian life” – the high standards it has been exhibiting for many years while using US arms, and again today.

Attacks on UN compounds sheltering refugees is another Israeli specialty. One famous incident is the Israeli bombardment of the clearly identified UN refugee shelter in Qana during Shimon Peres’s murderous Grapes of Wrath campaign, killing 106 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge there, including 52 children. To be sure, Israel is not alone in this practice. Twenty years earlier, its South African ally had launched an airborne strike deep into Angola against Cassinga, a refugee camp run by the Namibian resistance SWAPO.

Israeli officials laud the humanity of the army, which even goes so far as to inform residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.” In fact, no place in the prison is safe from Israeli sadism.

Some find it difficult to profit from Israel’s solicitude. An appeal to the world by the Gaza Catholic Church quotes a priest who explains the plight of residents of the House of Christ, a care home dedicated to looking after disabled children. They were removed to the Holy Family Church because Israel was targeting the area, but now, he writes, “The church of Gaza has received an order to evacuate. They will bomb the Zeitun area and the people are already fleeing. The problem is that the priest Fr George and the three nuns of Mother Teresa have 29 handicapped children and nine old ladies who can’t move. How will they manage to leave? If anyone can intercede with someone in power, and pray, please do it.”

Actually, it shouldn’t be difficult. Israel already provided the instructions at the Wafa Rehabilitation hospital. And fortunately, at least some states are interceding, as best they can. Five Latin American states — Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador and Peru – withdrew their ambassadors from Israel, following the course of Bolivia and Venezuela, which had broken relations in reaction to earlier Israeli crimes. These principled acts are another sign of the remarkable change in world relations as much of Latin America begins to free itself from western domination, sometimes providing a model of civilized behavior to those who controlled it for 500 years.

The hideous revelations elicited a different reaction from the Most Moral President in the World, the usual one: great sympathy for Israelis, bitter condemnation of Hamas, and calls for moderation by both sides. In his August 1 press conference, he did express concern for Palestinians “caught in the crossfire” (where?) while again vigorously supporting the right of Israel to defend itself, like everyone. Not quite everyone. Not of course Palestinians. They have no right to defend themselves, surely not when Israel is on good behavior, keeping to the norm of quiet-for-quiet: stealing their land, driving them out of their homes, subjecting them to a savage siege, and regularly attacking them with weapons provided by their protector.

Palestinians are like black Africans, the Namibian refugees in the Cassinga camp for example, all terrorists for whom the right of defense does not exist.

A 72-hour humanitarian truce was supposed to go into effect at 8am on August 1. It broke down almost at once. As I write, a few hours later, there are conflicting accounts and a good deal remains unclear. According to a press release of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza, which has a solid reputation for reliability, one of its field workers in Rafah, at the Egyptian border in the south, heard Israeli artillery firing at about 8:05am. By about 9:30am, after reports that an Israeli soldier had been captured, intensive air and artillery bombing of Rafah was underway, killing probably dozens of people and injuring hundreds who had returned to their homes after the ceasefire entered into effect, though numbers could not yet be verified.

The day before, on July 31, the Coastal Water Utility, the sole provider of water in the Gaza Strip, announced that it could no longer provide water or sanitation services because of lack of fuel and frequent attacks on personnel. Al Mezan reports that by then, “almost all primary health services have stopped in the Gaza Strip due to the lack of water, garbage collection and environment health services. UNRWA had also warned about the risk of imminent spreading of disease owing to the halt of water and sanitation services.” Meanwhile, on the eve of the cease-fire, Israeli missiles fired from aircraft continued to kill and wound victims throughout the region.

When the current episode of sadism is finally called off, whenever that will be, Israel hopes to be free to pursue its criminal policies in the occupied territories without interference, and with the US support it has enjoyed in the past: military, economic, and diplomatic; and also ideological, by framing the issues in conformity to Israeli doctrines. Gazans will be free to return to the norm in their Israeli-run prison, while in the West Bank they can watch in peace as Israel dismantles what remains of their possessions.

That is the likely outcome if the US maintains its decisive and virtually unilateral support for Israeli crimes and its rejection of the longstanding international consensus on diplomatic settlement. But the future will be quite different if the US withdraws that support. In that case it would be possible to move towards the “enduring solution” in Gaza that Secretary of State Kerry called for, eliciting hysterical condemnation in Israel because the phrase could be interpreted as calling for an end to Israel’s siege and regular attacks. And – horror of horrors – the phrase might even be interpreted as calling for implementation of international law in the rest of the occupied territories.

It is not that Israel’s security would be threatened by adherence to international law; it would very likely be enhanced. But as explained 40 years ago by Israeli general Ezer Weizman, later president, Israel could then not “exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.”

There are similar cases in recent history. Indonesian generals swore that they would never abandon what Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans called “the Indonesian Province of East Timor” as he was making a deal to steal Timorese oil. And as long as the ruling generals retained US support through decades of virtually genocidal slaughter, their goals were realistic. Finally, in September 1999, under considerable domestic and international pressure, President Clinton informed them quietly that the game was over and they instantly withdrew – while Evans turned to his new career as the lauded apostle of “Responsibility to Protect,” to be sure, in a version designed to permit western resort to violence at will.

Another relevant case is South Africa. In 1958, South Africa’s foreign minister informed the US ambassador that although his country was becoming a pariah state, it would not matter as long as US support continued. His assessment proved fairly accurate. Thirty years later, Reagan was the last significant holdout in supporting the apartheid regime, which was still sustaining itself. Within a few years, Washington joined the world, and the regime collapsed – not for that reason alone of course; one crucial factor was the remarkable Cuban role in the liberation of Africa, generally ignored in the West though not in Africa.

Forty years ago Israel made the fateful decision to choose expansion over security, rejecting a full peace treaty offered by Egypt in return for evacuation from the occupied Egyptian Sinai, where Israel was initiating extensive settlement and development projects. It has adhered to that policy ever since, making essentially the same judgment as South Africa did in 1958.

In the case of Israel, if the US decided to join the world, the impact would be far greater. Relations of power allow nothing else, as has been demonstrated over and over when Washington has demanded that Israel abandon cherished goals. Furthermore, Israel by now has little recourse, after having adopted policies that turned it from a country that was greatly admired to one that is feared and despised, a course it is pursuing with blind determination today in its resolute march towards moral deterioration and possible ultimate destruction.

Could US policy change? It’s not impossible. Public opinion has shifted considerably in recent years, particularly among the young, and it cannot be completely ignored. For some years there has been a good basis for public demands that Washington observe its own laws and cut off military aid to Israel. US law requires that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Israel most certainly is guilty of this consistent pattern, and has been for many years.

That is why Amnesty International, in the course of Israel’s murderous Cast Lead operation in Gaza, called for an arms embargo against Israel (and Hamas). Senator Patrick Leahy, author of this provision of the law, has brought up its potential applicability to Israel in specific cases, and with a well-conducted educational, organizational, and activist effort such initiatives could be pursued successively. That could have a very significant impact in itself, while also providing a springboard for further actions not only to punish Israel for its criminal behavior, but also to compel Washington to become part of “the international community” and to observe international law and decent moral principles.

Nothing could be more significant for the tragic Palestinian victims of many years of violence and repression.

[DEFCON]

I enjoyed the article; thanks Don.

Without a UN that's really up to the task of being what it is supposed to be as opposed to continuing on as the corrupt mess that it is today, there's little hope of middle eastern peace. The UN just walked away from their creation way back when without setting up proper rules for everyone that was living there to play by and it therefore has an obligation imho to the world to get back in the game and stay involved until the problems are resolved. UN troops in the area would be a good start while the political body does some final tweaking of the borders, capitols, and other things desperately in need of fixing. I don't know for certain, but it seems awful odd to me that the UN would have just left the Jews in place in the new Israel to determine the fate of those living there already unless it was intended as a tragic let of sorts to the military industrial complex in the post WWII environment?

[UpperDeck]

I sincerely mean no disrespect when I say that those words mean nothing. To defer to the UN---yet another political system---or any other "world organization" howsoever constituted, is simply to "pass the buck".

I think it a tragedy that we...the collective "we"...are essentially powerless. I might just as well go into a farmer's field and cry to the heavens in my loudest voice (and some would say--that's LOUD) and I would achieve the same result as hundreds...nay, thousands..of voices raised to the same cause. Our voices will not be heard above the din of political expediency.

How can we be heard?

If "damnation" falls upon those who saw evil and did nothing...how do we do something?

And I don't know. And in that admission, I confess how weak I truly am.

[Don Hudson]

UpperDeck;

In recognizing your confession of helplessness and which I also truly feel, I write.

Part of thinking and writing is seeking thoughtful contributions to the discourse of war and political expediency from people who are known to have depth and who suspend judgement on controversial matters in favour of curiosity. There are many who do so extremely well and I think it is important to seek them out, avoiding the shrill and hate-filled words that are the norm today. One cannot have perspective at the same time one lobs hate into another's courtyard, yet that is the only way forward to finding resolution.

The idea in discourse is not persuasion because I think most people are far better at knowing their own mind and making good decisions that work for ordinary people, than those we are allowed to elect every four years or so before we are expected to disappear until the next election.

The UN does not work because the United States refuses to permit it to work when it's priorities and goals are not coincidental with the Washington Consensus. That means regardless of the maining and the body count and the destruction of infrastructure, homes and businesses, the survival and superiority of Israel is unquestioned, untouchable and unassailable. The UN can say all it wants and the Security Council can pass all the Resolutions it will, as it has since the 1967 War - nothing will occur unless the United States permits it. Oslo has fallen entirely apart before it was given a chance and the world stood by while expansion of borders and appropriation of land continued.

What did the world expect would occur? How is this different than Crimea?

In other lands and times of recent memory, what Israel is doing to the Palestinians would be interpreted as an intentional, organized mass-exctinction of another race, but we are not permitted to utter such notions so they do not form part of the dialogue. The closest we are permitted is the blindingly-obvious notions of criminal acts by one state visited upon another including the murder of innocent civilians and even then, we may expect the traditional, familiar vehement denials of aggression followed by claims of "self-defence" and "required military responses to attacks" by Hamas.

It is a testimony to the capacity of the human mind for beliefs, justifications and hegemonies that the "defence" of one's country legitimates and includes the attacking of civilian targets and the intentional murder of innocent civilians including women and children.

None of this "sides" with the Palestinians - this is not a discussion or an argument for one side over the other. Both Albert's and Chomsky's views present undeniable characterizations of heinous, illegal and murderous human behaviour which has long past world acceptability in terms of the notion of "defence" of one's borders and one's nation's sovereignty. That, from both sides, must cease. Only then can the origins of territory and rights be determined and settled. Until the United States wishes it, it will not happen, and the battles and the killing will continue, unabated, and unrequitted.

[mo32a]

Well the US is not pleased with the latest attack.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/us-appalled-disgraceful-israeli-shelling-gaza-un-school

[Don Hudson]

"Well the US is not pleased with the latest attack."

Words are cheap. It's an old, standard response. What else would Washington say in the face of such blatant criminal acts? The shock is that so many accept these kinds of statements at face value.

But US and Israeli historical actions speak far louder. No one including Netanyahu will ever see the inside of the ICC in the Hague. Israel continues its illegal expansion and occupation. The arms trade continues unhindered by such headlines. Little serious public discussion is taking place out of fear of what response disagreeing with Israeli policies may bring. It is a formula for continuance, not change. The indifference shown by such headlines is profound and astonishing but historically "understandable". UN Resolution 242 , (November, 1967), states:

Operative Paragraph One "Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles:

(i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

It is not that the UN is itself ineffective. It is that the UN is not permitted to function as intended.

However, despite resolutions passed by US Congress and the Senate, public support for Israel is "slipping"...

[DEFCON]

I believe UD has fleshed out the group think quite nicely above with respect to the UN. His observations are pretty troubling being the UN was actually created to represent the 'collective us' and doesn't as envisioned. It's really disgusting to note that in spite of the obvious and openly corrupt activities of the UN, we the people feel helpless to demand there be a change in the situation. The UN is a form of world government and should not be allowed to serve as a wing of the global military industrial complex. A careful look at the UN's Agenda 21, suggest that through initiatives such as this, the UN ultimately intends to achieve total global control; i.e., one world government.

[J.O.]

Given that most of the governments in the world's strongest nations are also sycophants for the military-industrial complex, it should come as no surprise that the UN has suffered a similar fate.