Dissident Voice

1. The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!

The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant.  Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers of the military industrial complex over the next decade to combat a needlessly inflated enemy.  Forget diplomacy and funding the cause (and course) of peace – it's all about the weapons and the Yellow Peril, baby.

On April 18, Marles and Defence Industry Pat Conroy barraged the press with announcements that the defence budget would be bulked by A$50.3 billion by 2034, with a A$330 billion plan for weapons and equipment known as the Integrated Investment Program.  The measures were intended to satisfy the findings of the Defence Strategic Review.  "This is a significant lift compared to the $270 billion allocated for the 10-year period to 2029-30 as part of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and 2020 Force Structure Plan," crowed a statement from the Defence Department.

Such statements are often weighed down by jargon and buoyed by delusion.  The press were not left disappointed by the insufferable fluff.  Australia will gain "an enhanced lethality surface fleet and conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarines", an army with "littoral manoeuvre" capabilities "with a long-range land and maritime strike capability", an air force capable of delivering "long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance" with "an enhanced maritime, land and air-strike capability" and "a strengthened and integrated space and cyber capability".  The glaring omission here is the proviso that all such policies are being essentially steered by Washington's defence interests, with Canberra very  much the obedient servant.

The defence minister was firmly of the view that all this was taking place with some speed.  "We are acting very quickly in relation to [challenges]," Marles insists.  "I mean, the acquiring of a general-purpose frigate going forward, for example, will be the most rapid acquisition of a platform that size that we've seen in decades."  Anyone who uses the term "rapid" in a sentence on military acquisition is clearly a certified novice.

The ministers, along with the department interests they represent, are certainly fond of their expensive toys.  They are seeking a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as replacements for the F/A-18 Super Hornets.  The EA-18G Growler jets are also being replaced.  (That said, both sets of current fighters will see aging service till 2040.)  Three vessels will be purchased to advance undersea war capabilities, including the undersea drone prototype, the Ghost Shark.

The latter hopes to equip the Royal Australian Navy "with a stealthy, long-range autonomous undersea warfare capability that can conduct persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike."  Importantly, such acquisitions and developments are always qualified by how well they will work in tandem with the imperial power in question.  The media release from the Department of Defence prefers a more weasel-worded formula.  The Ghost Shark, for instance, "will also enhance Navy's ability to operate with allies and partners."

The new militarisation strategy is also designed to improve levels of recruitment.  Personnel have been putting down their weapons in favour of other forms of employment, while recruitment numbers are falling, much to the consternation of the pro-war lobby.  A suggested answer: recruit non-Australian nationals.  This far from brilliant notion will, Marles suggests, take some years.  But a good place to start would be the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders resident in Australia.  Sheer genius.

The announcement was also meant to offer budget trimmers a barely visible olive branch, promising "to divest, delay or re-scope projects that do not meet our strategic circumstances." (They could start with the submarines.)  A$5 billion, for instance, will be saved from terminating naval transport and replenishment ships intended to refuel and resupply war vessels at sea.

Hardly appropriate, opined some military pundits keen to keep plucking the money tree.  Jennifer Parker of the National Security College suggested that, "The removal of the Joint Support ship means there is no future plan to expand Australia's limited replenishment capability of two ships – which will in turn limit the force projection capability and reach of the expanded surface combatant fleet if the issue is not addressed."

The focus, as ever, is on Wicked Oriental Authoritarianism which is very much in keeping with the traditional Australian fear of slanty-eyed devils moving in on the spoils and playground of the Anglosphere.  Former RAAF officer and executive director of the Air Power Institute, Chris McInnes, barks in aeronautical terms that Australia's air power capability risks being "put in a holding pattern for the next 10 years."  Despotic China, however, was facing no such prospects.  "There is a risk of putting everything on hold.  The People's Liberal Army is not on hold.  They are going to keep progressing their aircraft."  (The air force seems to do wonders for one's grammar.)

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian was cool in his response to the latest promises of indulgent military spending Down Under.  "We hope Australia will correctly view China's development and strategic intentions, abandon the Cold War mentality, do more things to keep the region peaceful and stable and stop buzzing about China."  No harm in hoping.

The post The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

2. The Immense Hunger

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live.  Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance.  All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world's poor.  It is an old story, constantly updated.  It is one form of official terrorism.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today's savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it "left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword."  This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later.  Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of of one's ancestors' perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today's Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels?  Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price.  Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Frantz Fanon wrote accurately about the link between bread and land: "For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity."

Without bread to eat, as Marx and Victor Hugo told us in their different ways, the desperate become desperadoes.

The poet Patrick Kavanaugh, in his haunting long poem, "The Great Hunger," concluded it thus: "The hungry fiend/Screams the apocalypse of clay/In every corner of this land."  Lines that with a slight difference pertain to every land where famine is used as a weapon of war.

But why is this so?  What is this demonic force that drives some human animals to oppress others?

I think we can agree that humans have animal needs of hunger, thirst, sex, etc. that need to be satisfied, but that we also are symbolic creatures – angels with anuses as Ernest Becker has said so pungently in his classic book, The Denial of Death.  We live in a world of symbols, not merely matter.  Unlike other animal species, we have made death conscious and must deal with that consciousness one way or another.  We have beliefs, ideas, symbol systems and get our sense of self-worth symbolically.  Of course, the anuses are the problem because they remind us that despite all our highfalutin fantasies of omnipotence of the symbolic sort, what goes in one hole comes out the other and like those backdoor hole deposits we too are destined for underground holes in the earth.

But this is unacceptable.  The thought of it drives many savagely crazy – individuals, groups, and nations.  So, as Becker writes, "An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn't come off second best."  Herein lies the root of competition and the desire to be successful and hoist the symbolic trophies that declare us winners.  And if there are winners, there must be losers.  If I win and you lose, then I can feel superior to you and "good about myself," at least in the realm where we compete.  Equality is a problem for humans, whom Nietzsche termed "the disease called man."  This sense of competition can be relatively harmless or deadly.

History is replete with the latter type, where the fear of not being immortal leads to the extermination of others, as if to say: "See, we are number one."  You die but we live.  This is the case with the present Israeli policy of genocide of the Palestinians through famine, bombs, and guns.  The chosen enemy is always considered dirt, pigs, reduced to animal status not worthy to exist, and in a transference of existential trepidation emanating from a deep sense of insecurity masked as triumphalism, must be eliminated because their very existence threatens the oppressors God-like sense of themselves.

There is physical hunger and there is symbolic hunger.  Each needs satisfaction.  In a just and equitable world, the hunger for bread would be easy to satisfy.  It is the symbolic hunger for an answer to death that poses the deeper problem and causes the former.  For in a world where people could recognize their fears and deep-seated anxieties and stop transferring them to others, the bread of truth might reign.  We might stop slaughtering and starving others to purge ourselves of the self-hate and insecurity that drives us to feel the love of our fellow victimizers but the hate of our victims.  No one would be Number One.  All would be chosen and feast as equals at the table of the bread of life.

If only the Israeli and U.S. government leaders were wise enough to read, they might read Herman Melville's Moby Dick and turn from the path of their joint obsession to obliterate the world for a trophy that they will never hoist.  Ishmael might reach them with his words: "For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."  And they might seek peace, not an expansion of war.

If only. . . . but I dream, for they have chosen war, and the dark furies lay in wait.t navigation

The post The Immense Hunger first appeared on Dissident Voice.

3. The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats

My wife is currently cancer free, but her chemotherapy caused her to gain a lot of weight, which she wants to lose. She says that she doesn't have the will and self-discipline to change her diet or start an exercise routine. Instead, she seeks cures and promises from advertisers on social media for expensive fake remedies in a bottle. Of course, these never work as advertised. I warn her that, "If it sounds too good to be true, it is."

Such is the two-state solution. It has been a fake and a fantasy built on a contradiction from the day that Theodore Herzl proposed a Jewish state in Der Judenstaat in 1895. The contradiction is based on the fact that in order to create a Jewish state, enough Jews needed to be gathered in one place in order to create it.

How many is enough? According to Herzl, enough would be when Jews become the dominant ethnicity in the territory designated for the state. He recognized that this would mean not only gathering Jews, but also removing or otherwise reducing the non-Jewish population. Later Zionist leadership defined it as an 80% or more proportion of the desired ethnicity and a 20% or less proportion of the undesired ethnicity in the population. This is never workable in the long run without perpetual ethnic cleansing, because whenever the Jewish state is in danger of including too many non-Jews, it must find a way to reduce the number. In practice, this means that even the smaller remaining non-Jewish minority must also be repressed, so as to limit both their numbers and their power within the Jewish state.

How does this fit into the two-state solution? The answer is that it does not, no more than a "separate but equal" apartheid policy was a solution for preserving a white state in South Africa. Or, as articulated by US president Abraham Lincoln in 1858, such a state "…cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." A supremacist state cannot endure anywhere; not in South Africa, not in the US, not in Nazi Germany and not in Palestine. It will always regard the non-members of the preferred population as a threat.

Israeli proponents of the two-state solution have always required the Palestinian state to have less sovereignty than the Jewish state. To the extent that such a state was acceptable at all, it needed to be disarmed and controlled, and its territory severely compromised. But in fact, Israel never accepted a Palestinian state. The most it accepted was a "road map" to a state, which allowed Israel to pay lip service to the idea while gobbling up Palestinian land, moving Zionist settlers onto it, strangling Palestinian movement and development, and stealing the natural resources. The negotiations were merely a ruse to displace Palestinians while gradually taking more of everything they had.

Of course, even that wasn't enough. Although the land held by Palestinians was being confiscated, their population kept increasing, eventually motivating the current Israeli genocide. Israel was simply unable to control Palestinian numbers any other way. As Arnon Sofer expressed it in 2004, " …if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.  All day, every day."

This will not change with a two-state solution. If one of the two is a supremacist state — which is central to the ideology of political Zionism — then there will never be equality between the two, because the Zionist state will not permit it, and the non-Zionist Palestinian state and its citizens will always be considered a threat. But Israel has become more honest. It now openly rejects a Palestinian state of any kind, while the UN and most of its member states continue to insist upon the two-state fantasy, the only function of which is to prevent any solution at all, and to continue to enable Israel to implement its conquest of the rest of Palestine, as well as all or parts of Lebanon, Syria, the Sinai (Egypt), the East Bank (Jordan), and even parts of Saudi Arabia.

The two state "solution" to which every western politician pledges allegiance is a worse than useless quest for a fantasy that cannot be maintained because none of the concerned population really wants it. There are no Palestinians who would not prefer a one-state solution without Zionism, only a minority willing to accept half a loaf for fear of losing the other half. The Zionist two-staters, on the other hand, are either among the dwindling number of peaceniks, or cynical negotiators, making sure that Palestinians never quite concede enough to satisfy them, thus keeping the solution just out of reach while Israel completes its ethnic cleansing. Most Zionists would prefer no state except theirs, and no Palestinians at all.

If this is reminiscent of South Africa, it is because Israel also is also an exclusivist state based on racial or ethnic identity. The solution is the same: to abolish the offending racist ideology – whether apartheid or Zionism – and create one state with equal rights for all, and restoration or compensation to Palestinians for their losses. The nonviolent 2018-19 Great March of Return attempt to move toward such a solution was thwarted by Israel's murderous reaction to it and the world's indifference. The October 7, 2023 armed initiative by Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance is therefore the predictable (but unpredicted) Clausewitzian reaction, and it appears to be succeeding, despite the enormous sacrifices of the Palestinian people. In fact, it is hard to imagine how this is not the beginning of the end for the Zionist dream. The genocidal horrors that Israel is committing will isolate it from most of the world for the foreseeable future, and even much of the world Jewish community will also abandon it, if they have not done so already. A racist supremacist Jewish colonial state is an anachronism that belongs in the past. Only the restoration of a Palestinian state for all who consider it their home and are willing to respect its laws and standards can be the future.

The post The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats first appeared on Dissident Voice.

4. Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

— George Orwell, 1984

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What's playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn't just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Read the fine print: it's a doozy.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans' financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government's spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) explains:

"If you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone, or a computer. So think for a moment about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. The people are not just the engineers who install, maintain, and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government can deputize any of these people against their will, and force them in effect to become what amounts to an agent for Big Brother—for example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight whatsoever: The FISA Court won't know about it, Congress won't know about it. Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. Unless they can afford high-priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all."

This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly steamrollered into an expansion of the government's surveillance powers.

We should have seen this coming.

After all, the Police State doesn't relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn't look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn't like to be restricted.

What most Americans don't get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that's how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.

These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.

It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.

It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government's "technotyranny" surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it's hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government's vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing.

Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

Whether you're walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking you. This doesn't even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. These corporate trackers monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere and share the data with the government.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to collect data and spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power.

These government snoops are constantly combing through and harvesting vast quantities of our communications, then storing it in massive databases for years. Once this information—collected illegally and without any probable cause—is ingested into NSA servers, other government agencies can often search through the databases to make criminal cases against Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism or anything national security-related.

Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they're only looking to get the "bad" guys who are overseas.

Don't believe it.

The government's definition of a "bad" guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.

It's telling that even after it was revealed that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state's vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens, we're still debating whether they should be allowed to continue to sidestep the Fourth Amendment.

This is how the government operates, after all: our objections are routinely overruled and our rights trampled underfoot.

It works the same every time.

First, the government seeks out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism—and then they use those powers against the American people.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless "backdoor" searches for Americans' private communications each year.

No one is spared.

Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.

Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.

The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply "incidental," as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.

As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies "could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data."

According to the Wall Street Journal, "The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market."

Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential "extremists."

Ask the government why it's carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you'll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

What this is really all about, however, is control.

What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for "extremism" indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we're all in trouble.

You don't have to do anything illegal.

For that matter, you don't even have to challenge the government's authority.

Frankly, you don't even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you've done anything wrong, it's just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it won't be long before Big Brother's Thought Police are locking us up to "protect us" from ourselves.

At that point, we will disappear.

The post Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

5. The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point

The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government."

Palestinian, Muslim and Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups have been in the forefront of the anti-imperialist peace movement. With strong youth components, they are not confused by either relying on sell-out liberal Democrats (e.g., anti-Iraq War) or by utopian calls for leaderless organizations without concrete demands (e.g., Occupy). Nor have been distracted by individualistic expressions of anger by trashing small businesses or in adventuristic confrontations with the police.

The Palestinian resistance has radicalized millions worldwide. The popular demand for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine is leading to a still larger project to cease the US-led imperialist order.

The overall consciousness of the resurgent peace movement reflects the normalization of anti-imperialism as a leading current; antiwar sentiment is becoming explicitly anti-imperialist.

Evolving understanding of the Ukraine conflict

The peace movement recognizes that, although Hamas's action of October 7 came as a surprise, it did not simply erupt out of the blue. The uprising had a 75-year gestation starting with the Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the settler colonialist State of Israel.

Initially, there was less clarity regarding the events in Ukraine of February 24, 2022. With research and reflection, most of the movement came to understand the conflict did not begin that day. The supposedly "unprovoked" Russian intervention in Ukraine was sparked by NATO moving closer and closer to the Russian border, the 2014 Maidan coup, the sabotage of the Minsk agreements, etc.

A consensus is maturing in the antiwar movement that Ukraine is a proxy war by the US and its NATO allies to weaken Russia. Even key corporate press and government officials now recognize the conflict as a "full proxy war" by the US designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable Russia.

Likewise, opinions are coalescing around recognizing that there is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world's reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

The antiwar movement may differ on whether to call February 24 an invasion, an incursion, or a special military operation to protect ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine under attack. But unity has been forged that the solution to the conflict is a negotiated settlement and that the US/NATO project of "winning" the war is a threat to world peace. The outlier is the Ukraine Solidarity Network (USN).

Still using the language of anti-imperialism, USN's  left-leaning intellectuals and activists are opposed to a negotiated peace but champion a "victory" backed by the US and NATO. Further, they uphold the "right" of the US to fund what they personalize as a war against Putin. Their statement on the second anniversary of the war accuses Washington of having a "double standard" for supporting imperialism in Palestine but being on the side of justice in Ukraine. Other peace activists see USN's opposition to the US involvement in Palestine, but not to its complicity in Ukraine, as a double standard.

The USN's call for a Ukraine victory is consonant with the Democratic Party's. In contrast, for example, the United National Antiwar Coalition's (UNAC) position on Ukraine is: "No to NATO's proxy war and Biden's $80 billion military aid to Ukraine! No to Ukraine's joining NATO!" Similarly, the Peace in Ukraine Coalition demands: ""STOP the weapons! START the talks!"

The emerging anti-imperialist peace movement sees the nature of US imperialism as systematic and not elective. The US empire is fundamentally imperialist; it is not a matter of choice.

First major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic

In the first major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic, UNAC brought together 400 activists in Saint Paul, MN, on April 5-7, under the banner of "decolonization and the fight against imperialism."

Among the some fifty groups participating were the Alliance for Global Justice, American Muslims for Palestine, Black Alliance for Peace, CodePink, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, US Palestinian Community Network, and Workers World Party. Local organizations included Students for Justice in Palestine, Twin Cities Students for a Democratic Society, and the venerable Women Against Military Madness, who have been protesting weekly in the streets since 1982.

The immediacy of militant organizing was reported by Danaka Katovich of CodePink, Cody Urban of the Resist US Wars, Wyatt Miller of the Minneapolis Antiwar Committee, and a number of other youthful leaders.

Palestinian liberation against colonialism was a major focal point of the conference. Mnar Adley, editor of MintPress News, movingly described her experience of living under Israeli suppression. Today, she explained, "the Intifada has been globalized," adding that the Palestinian resistance and the movement in its support have exposed the Democrats as the "bloodthirsty war-hungry party that it is."

With the US presidential election imminent, conference participants had no illusions that either corporate party stands for peace. The initiative to cast ballots in the Democratic primary for "uncommitted" (to signify opposition to Biden's complicity in the war on Gaza and to demand a ceasefire) received considerable support. Spontaneous chants of "shame" erupted throughout the conference whenever the Democrats' conduct was raised.

K.J. Noh of Pivot for Peace warned about US preparations for war against China. Michael Wong of Veterans for Peace described the world struggle as not one of democracy versus authoritarianism but of national liberation versus imperialism.

Ambassadors Lautaro Sandino from Nicaragua, whose government is taking Germany to the World Court for facilitating Israel's genocide, and Dr. Sidi M. Omar of the Polisario Front of Western Sahara addressed the conference. International solidarity was affirmed in workshops on Zones of Peace in Our Americas, opposition of coercive economic measures, and NO to NATO.

Combating repression against the movement was highlighted by Efia Nwangaza's presentation on the campaign to "Stop Kop Cities" and Dr. Aisha Fields' on resisting the attacks on the African People's Socialist Party. Mel Underbakke addressed FBI frame ups of Muslims, and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley briefed the conference on the mobilization for Julian Assange. Lessons were also drawn by speakers from the successful defenses of the Antiwar 23 and the freeing of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.

Tasks ahead

Janine Solanki with the Mobilization Against War and Occupation in Vancouver spoke about the "unfolding antiwar and pro-Palestine movement that has a potential to go beyond the Vietnam antiwar movement." She advised that what has been a mass spontaneous movement now needs to progress into a more coordinated and structured form. "We have humanity on our side…our role is to really organize these forces."

Black Agenda Report (BAR) executive editor Margaret Kimberley concluded the conference with the mandate to stop the wars at home and abroad. The current context is a neoliberal economic regime failing to meet basic domestic needs and a global pax Americana becoming increasingly contested. In reference to the workshop on climate change, she observed, "we are in a battle for survival; that's not hyperbole."

In short, the conference was indicative of the larger movement that is melding youthful demographics – buoyed by the mass protests against the war on Palestine – with the mature understanding of the gravity of the tasks ahead. Kimberly closed with the guidance to "engage in principled struggle with our comrades; if you're not struggling with someone you're not doing enough work."

Prospects for the anti-imperialist movement

Will the Democratic Party's formula of "Trump trumps everything" quash the antiwar initiative? Back in 2015, the late BAR editor Glen Ford presciently wrote: "The Democrats hope the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, will disappear amid the hype of the coming election season." What will happen to the 2024 antiwar protest movement when another US presidential election looms five months from now?

Resisting being absorbed into what Ford called the Democratic election blitz to bury the movement will be the People's Conference for Palestine, May 24-26, in Detroit, which will bring together anti-imperialist groups including the Palestine Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, Al-Awda, and Healthcare Workers for Palestine. The ANSWER Coalition, associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is a leading element. ANSWER and some of these other groups had also been instrumental in building major pro-Palestine demonstrations in Washington DC, the biggest ever in the US.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, is among the faith-based groups that have carved out a new and implicitly anti-imperialist identity for their followers. Surely JVP, along with other Jewish activist organizations, like IfNotNow and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, will continue to militantly protest US support for Israel's apartheid system in unity with Palestinian and other activist groups.

Come this summer, CodePink, Bayan, and others will be confronting the largest joint war exercises in the world with Cancel RIMPAC. Protests are also scheduled for NATO's 75th anniversary summit, July 6-7, in Washington DC; the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15-18; and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 19-22.

The post The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point first appeared on Dissident Voice.

6. We’re Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer

Award Winning Documentary Film by Graham Peebles

Ignored by western governments and largely overlooked by media a genocide is taking place in Ethiopia. The Amhara people, a large ethnic group, are being ethnically cleansed from the region of Oromia, the largest region in the country.

Tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed by Oromo fanatics (estimates range from 30,000 – 50,000); over three million have been displaced, homes, land and livestock stolen.

The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF or Shene) together with the Oromo regional militia are responsible for the carnage, with the support of the Oromo Regional Authority and the federal government.

In addition to mass murder and wholesale displacement, estimates claim that more than 300,000 Amhara have been arrested. Journalists, human rights workers, parliamentarians, academics, protestors and students, are all among those interned without trial, often in undisclosed locations. In detention, torture and execution is reportedly widespread.

Hundreds of Amhara men and boys have been herded into industrial detention centres (that some are calling concentration camps), where they are held without charge and injected with contagious diseases.

At the request of an Ethiopian human rights group (Amhara Association of America) I travelled to Ethiopia in June 2023 to make a short documentary. We spent time in Internal Displacement Camps and met some of the people affected. Their stories were deeply distressing: children murdered in front of their parents; young men slaughtered en masse; pregnant women attacked, their bellies stabbed, the baby killed. Whole communities eradicated.

The purpose of the film is to raise awareness of this appalling issue, and to add our voice to those calling on western governments (the US, EU and UK in particular), to apply pressure on the Ethiopian Government, led by Prime-Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Screenings of the award winning documentary (Best Documentary at the Global Film Awards and Best Human Rights Film at the World Film Festival in Cannes) have taken place in Washington DC, Dallas, Toronto, Canada. More screenings are planned in April/May/June in the US.

The post We're Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer first appeared on Dissident Voice.

7. America’s Now Evident Plan to Use AUKUS to Spark War With China

There was much concern, in international circles, about the the U.S. Government's recent efforts to open a NATO office in Tokyo so as to extend its military alliance against Russia to become also a military alliance against China. When that initiative scared some other NATO members, it was stopped, and the fear temporarily subsided. But then suddenly, on April 8, it was announced that (despite some hurdles that would first need to be overcome) America's new (2021) anti-China military alliance, AUKUS, is "considering" (meaning here intending) to, in effect, bring into that alliance Japan (which has 79 U.S. military bases). On April 10, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met at the White House to plan how this would be done. The next day, Defense News bannered "AUKUS allies float path for Japan to join tech sharing pact". So, the U.S., which has 900 foreign military bases and actually spends around half of the entire planet's military expenses, and therefore has no actual need for any military 'allies', but instead brings them in to serve as proxies for itself and to be able to say (for propaganda-purposes) "we" when referring to itself, so as to 'justify' its numerous invasions and to prevent any of its 'allied' (or colonial) countries from criticizing it, is now effectively displaying the reality to anyone who worries about such matters. This reality is: Yes, the U.S. Government is demanding to, and will, control China, too. The U.S. already has military bases against China in Australia, Guam, Japan, South Korea, Marshall Islands, Mariana Islands, Palau, Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, and Thailand; so, it can invade China almost instantly from plenty of bases to China's south and east.

Even some Australians (though hardly yet any Brits to my knowledge) are raising alarms at this accession of Japan into AUKUS. For example, the Australian commentator John Menadue, a former Cabinet Minister, published at his blog on April 16th, "Lest We Forget: Japan joining AUKUS a stark reminder of China's Century of Humiliation", by  Robert Macklin, which opened:

With the addition of Japan, AUKUS ceases to be a device to supply nuclear powered submarines to Australia several decades in the future but a stark reminder of the oppressive powers that abused Chinese sovereignty in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It was Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles who first suggested that the inclusion of Japan in the AUKUS group was a natural 'evolution' of the pact. As such it was risible, if understandable; Marles is not the sharpest knife in the Cabinet drawer.

But when it was adopted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – and then the American president Joe Biden – there is cause for concern. With the addition of Japan, AUKUS ceases to be a device to supply nuclear powered submarines to Australia several decades in the future but a stark reminder of the oppressive powers that abused Chinese sovereignty in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Japan's membership could hardly be more provocative to a country that suffered the indignity of Japanese control of its Taiwan province for 50 years from 1895 and its invasion of the mainland throughout the second world war.

The notorious Massacre of Nanking – where the atrocities included 200,000 murders and 20,000 rapes of the civilian population – was but one of hundreds of outrages visited upon the Chinese people. …

When he referred there to America's having created AUKUS as "a device to supply nuclear powered submarines to Australia several decades in the future," he was referring to the shady excuses that it gave at the time for creating AUKUS, and which entailed an open affront to France — including coercion forcing France to cancel a lucrative contract France had with Australia's Government, which affront France promised to (but never did) retaliate against the U.S. for. But, now, this bringing of the first non-Anglo member into America's (initially pure-Anglo) military alliance against China, proves that its real target, and the real aim of AUKUS, is to conquer China — nothing less than that (just as NATO demands to win its war against Russia in the battlefield of Ukraine on Russia's border).

On April 15, Lin Congyi, of China's Defense Ministry, headlined "AUKUS makes more mistakes by roping in Japan", and he commented:

Recently, the US, the UK, and Australia announced that Japan would join AUKUS, causing great concern among the international community. This is the first time that the three countries have announced a partner since the organization was established in September 2021. Japanese officials responded by saying that Japan "recognizes" the importance of AUKUS. Many Japanese citizens criticized AUKUS for promoting membership expansion regardless of concerns from all walks of life, which will intensify camp confrontation and the risks of nuclear proliferation, and undermine peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.

AUKUS is short for the Trilateral Security Partnership between Australia, the UK and the US, which has two main pillars. Pillar I focuses on the deployment of nuclear submarines in Australia and the joint research, development and construction of the next-generation nuclear submarines by the three countries. Cooperation in this area is "limited to the US, UK and Australia". Pillar II focuses on the joint development and deployment of new technologies to enhance advanced combat capabilities.

Why did they choose Japan in the first place? Analysts believe that there are two reasons. From a technical perspective, the US, the UK and Australia have their respective shortcomings in the field of high technology, while Japan, with advantages in the fields of hypersonic weapons, quantum technology, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence, can play a greater role in defense technology. On the part of Japan, it hopes to improve its defense capabilities and increase its military influence in the Asia-Pacific region by sharing sensitive military technologies with the US, the UK, Australia, and other countries.

Strategically, these countries also have their own calculations. The US sees AUKUS as a key part of the implementation of the so-called "Indo-Pacific Strategy" and wants to attract more allies to join in order to achieve the goal of containing China. The UK is pushing ahead with the "Global Britain" strategy, and its security cooperation with Japan is becoming deeper. It hopes, in a bid to become more involved in Asia-Pacific affairs with the aid of Japan and expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

Australia, on the other hand, put high expectations on Pillar II due to the sluggish progress of Pillar I and thus supported the inclusion of Japan. As for Japan, it wants to use AUKUS as a new tool to carry out its military agenda in the Asia-Pacific region and contain China. …

The U.S. Government, and its UK partner, are going for broke, in order to win an all-inclusive U.S.-UK empire — a U.S./UK global dictatorship that includes all of the world's nations as its colonies (INCLUDING Russia and China). The idea here is nothing less than to terminate national sovereignty and replace it with an international global dictatorship by the U.S./UK partnership: all sovereignty being based in Washington and London, no longer under the internal control of any other individual nation. This is the contemporary U.S./UK vision for their Brave New World. Never has that vision been more clear than it now is: indisputable. (The links here document it.) If this effort to bring Japan into AUKUS succeeds, it will be a virtual declaration of war against China.

As regards China's alleged imperial ambitions, an April 16 article in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post headlined "China was never an imperialist state" and pointed out that "it could be highly problematic to map directly the Western experience of empire, such as when we talk about the Spanish, Portuguese, British, or even the American empires" because "The Chinese empire, through different dynasties, often functioned more like the opposite of an empire, and the oft-cited tribute system frequently worked in reverse," meaning that what some Westerners have alleged to be or to have been 'imperialism' by China was actually dynastic feuds within China. China's invasions were internal — as contrasted to the Western experience, which explored, exploited, and invaded, far away from the homeland, in order to conquer, control, and extract from, a distant culture. What America is now trying to do to China (make it become yet another U.S. colony), has no parallel to anything that China has ever done. It is pure foreign aggression — which since 1945 has been the U.S. specialty.

The post America's Now Evident Plan to Use AUKUS to Spark War With China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

8. Pro-Israel Municipality Claims “Discrimination”

A rich, exclusionary municipality is claiming persecution because Parliament passed a motion to lessen Canada's role in a genocide. Hampstead highlights the moral abyss of large swaths of Canada's Jewish community.

Last Monday the Montreal area municipality unanimously passed a motion demanding "the Council of Hampstead, hereby expresses its non-confidence in the Government of Canada for its distancing from the longstanding policy of support for Israel, which has resulted in a major spike in antisemitism across Canada; THAT the Town council calls upon the Government of Canada to reaffirm its commitment to supporting Israel and to take concrete actions to combat antisemitism in all its forms within our nation."

Hampstead is fervently anti-Palestinian. An Israeli flag hangs outside City Hall and in November the municipality passed a law giving $1,000 tickets — with money raised sent to Israel — to anyone tearing down posters of the hostages Hamas took to Gaza on October 7. They've instigated multiple fundraising projects for Israel and in December Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi told me he would continue supporting Israel even if they killed 100,000 Palestinian children since "good needs to prevail over evil".

Despite promoting genocide, Hampstead claims egalitarian values and its statement calls for "solidarity with communities facing discrimination and persecution". The first whereas in the recent motion claims "the Town of Hampstead, has historically upheld values of inclusivity, tolerance, and Support for communities facing discrimination." But Hampstead is a wealthy, ethnically segregated, enclave. It traces its roots to Britain's late-1800s Garden City movement, which was a move by London's elite to move out of the city centre. Just west of Montréal, Hampstead was established by some of the wealthiest Canadians in 1914. The municipality doesn't allow retail shops or industrial land in its boundaries and is one of the wealthiest municipalities in Québec. Until after the Second World War, it was almost entirely WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Today over three-quarters of Hampstead's 7,500 residents are Jewish and it is one be the most ethnically homogeneous areas in greater Montreal. The median income of the 2,500 households was $150,000 per year in 2021 (almost twice the Montreal wide median). Over half of the homes have four bedrooms or more. The average home value in 2021 was $1,766,000 (three times the region's average).

To live in the exclusive municipality, residents pay large sums in property taxes. With only residential properties covering the city's costs, the average Hampstead house pays $15,393 annually in property tax.

To ensure a Zionist and Jewish centric outlook many residents put their kids in private Jewish schools and summer camps. The current ethnic segregation is stunning for a community that comprised seven per cent of Montreal's population a century ago. (The larger adjacent municipality of Côte Saint-Luc is two-thirds Jewish.)

Hampstead is an exclusionary well-to-do community that promotes slaughtering and starving Palestinians because they aren't Jewish. It is a bastion of Jewish supremacy that bemoans "antisemitism".

It is beyond absurd for this wealthy, exclusionary, genocide promoting municipality to decry "discrimination" and "persecution".

The post Pro-Israel Municipality Claims "Discrimination" first appeared on Dissident Voice.

9. The West now wants “restraint” after months of fuelling a genocide in Gaza

Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of "restraint" – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.

Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel's layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.

It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired Scud missiles during the Gulf war of 1991.

The United Nations Security Council was hurriedly pressed into session on Sunday, with Washington and its allies calling for a de-escalation of tensions that could all too easily lead to the outbreak of war across the Middle East and beyond.

"Neither the region nor the world can afford more war," the UN's secretary general, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting. "Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate."

Israel, meanwhile, vowed to "exact the price" against Iran at a time of its choosing.

But the West's abrupt conversion to "restraint" needs some explaining.

After all, western leaders showed no restraint when Israel bombed Iran's consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing a senior general and more than a dozen other Iranians – the proximate cause of Tehran's retaliation on Saturday night.

Under the Vienna Convention, the consulate is not only a protected diplomatic mission but is viewed as sovereign Iranian territory. Israel's attack on it was an unbridled act of aggression – the "supreme international crime", as the Nuremberg tribunal ruled at the end of the Second World War.

For that reason, Tehran invoked article 51 of the United Nations charter, which allows it to act in self-defence.

Shielding Israel

And yet, rather than condemning Israel's dangerous belligerence – a flagrant attack on the so-called "rules-based order" so revered by the US – western leaders lined up behind Washington's favourite client state.

At a Security Council meeting on 4 April, the US, Britain and France intentionally spurned restraint by blocking a resolution that would have condemned Israel's attack on the Iranian consulate – a vote that, had it not been stymied, might have sufficed to placate Tehran.

At the weekend, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron still gave the thumbs-up to Israel's flattening of Iran's diplomatic premises, saying he could "completely understand the frustration Israel feels" – though he added, without any hint of awareness of his own hypocrisy, that the UK "would take very strong action" if a country bombed a British consulate.

The foreign secretary is asked about Israel bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria & he says he understands Israels frustration!

Hes then asked what the UK would do if another country flattened one of our consulates & he says we would take very strong action pic.twitter.com/l3E0A8gzri

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 15, 2024

By shielding Israel from any diplomatic consequences for its act of war against Iran, the western powers ensured Tehran would have to pursue a military response instead.

But it did not end there. Having stoked Iran's sense of grievance at the UN, Biden vowed "iron-clad" support for Israel – and grave consequences for Tehran – should it dare to respond to the attack on its consulate.

Iran ignored those threats. On Saturday night, it launched some 300 drones and missiles, at the same time protesting vociferously about the Security Council's "inaction and silence, coupled with its failure to condemn the Israeli regime's aggressions".

Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday's Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel's attack on Iran's diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.

Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called "a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards". He added: "You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room."

There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran's attack.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praised RAF pilots for their "bravery and professionalism" in helping to "protect civilians" in Israel.

In a statement, Keir Starmer, leader of the supposedly opposition Labour party, condemned Iran for generating "fear and instability", rather than "peace and security", that risked stoking a "wider regional war". His party, he said, would "stand up for Israel's security".

My statement on the Iranian regime's attack on Israel. pic.twitter.com/8vth7Aok5E

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) April 13, 2024

The "restraint" the West demands relates only, it seems, to Iran's efforts to defend itself.

Starving to death

Given the West's new-found recognition of the need for caution, and the obvious dangers of military excess, now may be the time for its leaders to consider demanding restraint more generally – and not just to avoid a further escalation between Iran and Israel.

Over the past six months Israel has bombed Gaza into rubble, destroyed its medical facilities and government offices, and killed and maimed many, many tens of thousands of Palestinians. In truth, such is the devastation that Gaza some time ago lost the ability to count its dead and wounded.

At the same time, Israel has intensified its 17-year blockade of the tiny enclave to the point where, so little food and water are getting through, the population are in the grip of famine. People, especially children, are literally starving to death.

The International Court of Justice, the world's highest court, chaired by an American judge, ruled back in January – when the situation was far less dire than it is now – that a "plausible" case had been made Israel was committing genocide, a crime against humanity strictly defined in international law.

And yet there were no calls by western leaders for "restraint" as Israel bombed Gaza into ruins week after week, striking its hospitals, levelling its government offices, blowing up its universities, mosques and churches, and destroying its bakeries.

Rather, President Biden has repeatedly rushed through emergency arms sales, bypassing Congress, to make sure Israel has enough bombs to keep destroying Gaza and killing its children.

When Israeli leaders vowed to treat Gaza's population like "human animals", denying them all food, water and power, western politicians gave their assent.

Sunak was not interested in recruiting his brave RAF pilots to "protect civilians" in Gaza from Israel, and Starmer showed no concern about the "fear and instability" felt by Palestinians from Israel's reign of terror.

Quite the reverse. Starmer, famed as a human rights lawyer, even gave his approval to Israel's collective punishment of the people of Gaza, its "complete siege", as integral to a supposed Israeli "right of self-defence".

In doing so, he overturned one of the most fundamental principles of international law that civilians should not be targeted for the actions of their leaders. As is now all too apparent, he conferred a death sentence on the people of Gaza.

Where was "restraint" then?

Missing in action

Similarly, restraint went out of the window when Israel fabricated a pretext for eradicating the UN aid agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza's starving population.

Even though Israel was unable to offer any evidence for its claim that a handful of UNRWA staff were implicated in an attack on Israel on 7 October, western leaders hurriedly cut off funding to the agency. In doing so, they became actively complicit in what the World Court already feared was a genocide.

Where was the restraint when Israeli officials – with a long history of lying to advance their state's military agenda – made up stories about Hamas beheading babies, or carrying out systematic rapes on 7 October? All of this was debunked by an Al Jazeera investigation drawing largely on Israeli sources.

Those genocide-justifying deceptions were all too readily amplified by western politicians and media.

Israel showed no restraint in destroying Gaza's hospitals, or taking hostage and torturing thousands of Palestinians it grabbed off the street.

All of that got a quiet nod from western politicians.

Where was the restraint in western capitals when protesters took to the streets to call for a ceasefire, to stop Israel's bloodletting of women and children, the majority of Gaza's dead? The demonstrators were smeared – are still smeared – by western politicians as supporters of terrorism and antisemites.

And where was the demand for restraint when Israel tore up the rulebook on the laws of war, allowing every would-be strongman to cite the West's indulgence of Israeli atrocities as the precedent justifying their own crimes?

On each occasion, when it favoured Israel's malevolent goals, the West's commitment to "restraint" went missing in action.

Top-dog client state

There is a reason why Israel has been so ostentatious in its savaging of Gaza and its people. And it is the very same reason Israel felt emboldened to violate the diplomatic sanctity of Iran's consulate in Damascus.

Because for decades Israel has been guaranteed protection and assistance from the West, whatever crimes it commits.

Israel's founders ethnically cleansed much of Palestine in 1948, far beyond the terms of partition set out by the UN a year earlier. It imposed a military occupation on the remnants of historic Palestine in 1967, driving out yet more of the native population. It then imposed a regime of apartheid on the few areas where Palestinians remained.

In their West Bank reservations, Palestinians have been systematically brutalised, their homes demolished, and illegal Jewish settlements built on their land. The Palestinians' holy places have been gradually surrounded and taken from them.

Separately, Gaza has been sealed off for 17 years, and its population denied freedom of movement, employment and the basics of life.

Israel's reign of terror to maintain its absolute control has meant imprisonment and torture are a rite of passage for most Palestinian men. Any protest is ruthlessly crushed.

Now Israel has added mass slaughter in Gaza – genocide – to its long list of crimes.

Israel's displacements of Palestinians to neighbouring states caused by its ethnic cleansing operations and slaughter have destabilised the wider region. And to secure its militarised settler-colonial project in the Middle East – and its place as Washington's top-dog client state in the region – Israel has intimidated, bombed and invaded its neighbours on a regular basis.

Its attack on Iran's consulate in Damascus was just the latest of serial humiliations faced by Arab states.

And through all of this, Washington and its vassal states have directed no more than occasional, lip-service calls for restraint towards Israel. There were never any consequences, but instead rewards from the West in the form of endless billions in aid and special trading status.

'Something rash'

So why, after decades of debauched violence from Israel, has the West suddenly become so interested in "restraint"? Because on this rare occasion it serves western interests to calm the fires Israel is so determined to stoke.

The Israeli strike on Iran's consulate came just as the Biden administration was finally running out of excuses for providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that has allowed Israel to slaughter, maim and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over six months.

Demands for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel have been reaching fever pitch, with Biden haemorrhaging support among parts of his Democratic base as he faces a re-run presidential election later this year against a resurgent rival, Donald Trump.

Small numbers of votes could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Israel had every reason to fear that its patron might soon pull the rug from under its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.

But having destroyed the entire infrastructure needed to support life in the enclave, Israel needs time for the consequences to play out: either mass starvation there, or a relocation of the population elsewhere on supposedly "humanitarian" grounds.

A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza's desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his "iron-clad" commitment to Israel's protection.

And to top it all, with the US drawn directly into a war against Iran, Washington would have little choice but to assist Israel in its long campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear energy programme.

Israel wants to remove any potential for Iran to develop a bomb, one that would level the military playing field between the two in ways that would make Israel far less certain that it can continue to act as it pleases across the region with impunity.

That is why Biden officials are airing concerns to the US media that Israel is ready to "do something rash" in an attempt to drag the administration into a wider war.

The truth is, however, that Washington long ago cultivated Israel as its military Frankenstein's monster. Israel's role was precisely to project US power ruthlessly into the oil-rich Middle East. The price Washington was more than willing to accept was Israel's eradication of the Palestinian people, replaced by a fortress "Jewish state".

Calling for Israel to exercise "restraint" now, as its entrenched lobbies flex their muscles meddling in western politics, and self-confessed fascists rule Israel's government, is beyond parody.

If the West really prized restraint, they should have insisted on it from Israel decades ago.

• Article first published in Middle East Eye

The post The West now wants "restraint" after months of fuelling a genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

10. Faulty Assurances: The Judicial Torture of Assange Continues

Only this month, the near comatose US President, Joe Biden, made a casual, castaway remark that his administration was "considering" the request by Australia that the case against Julian Assange be concluded.  The WikiLeaks founder has already spent five gruelling years in London's Belmarsh prison, where he continues a remarkable, if draining campaign against the US extradition request on 18 charges, 17 incongruously and outrageously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

Like readings of coffee grinds, his defenders took the remark as a sign of progress.  Jennifer Robinson, a longtime member of Assange's legal team, told Sky News Australia that Biden's "response, this is what we have been asking for over five years.  Since 2010 we've been saying this is a dangerous precedent that's being set.  So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it." WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson found the mumbled comment from the president "extraordinary",  hoping "to see in the coming days" whether "clarification of what this means" would be offered by the powerful.

On April 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canberra had asked their US counterparts whether a felony plea deal could be reached, enabling the publisher to return to Australia.  "Prosecutors and a lawyer for Assange have discussed a range of potential deals, including those that include pleading guilty to a felony under the espionage law under which he was indicted, and those of conspiring to mishandle classified information, which would be a misdemeanor, people familiar with the matter have said."

Last month, the UK High Court gave what can only be regarded as an absurd prescription to the prosecution should they wish to succeed.  Extradition would be unlikely to be refused if Assange was availed of protections offered by the First Amendment (though rejecting claims that he was a legitimate journalist), was guaranteed not to be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence on account of his nationality, and not be subject to the death penalty.  That such directions were even countenanced shows the somewhat delusionary nature of British justices towards their US counterparts.

On April 16, Assange's supporters received confirmation that the extradition battle, far from ending, would continue in its tormenting grind.  Not wishing to see the prospect of a full hearing of Assange's already hobbled arguments, the US State Department, almost to the hour, filed the assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).  "Assange," the US Embassy in London claimed with aping fidelity to the formula proposed by the High Court, "will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing."

Were he to be extradited, "Assange will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States."  An obvious caveat, and one that should be observed with wary consideration by the High Court judges, followed.  "A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts."

The US embassy also promised that, "A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange.  The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense."  This undertaking does not dispel the threat of Assange being charged with additional offences such as traditional espionage, let alone aiding or abetting treason, which would carry the death penalty.

In 2020, Gordon Kromberg, the chief Department of Justice prosecutor behind the case, told the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales that the US "could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information."  There was also the likelihood that Assange, in allegedly revealing the names of US intelligence sources thereby putting them at risk of harm, would also preclude the possibility of him relying on such protections.

That the zealous Kromberg will be fronting matters should Assange reach US shores is more than troubling.  Lawyers and civil rights activists have accused him of using the Eastern District Court of Virginia for selective and malicious prosecutions.  As Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept observed with bleak accuracy in July 2021, "[r]ather than being pushed into obscurity by these efforts, today he is serving as a key figure in one of the most important civil liberties cases in the world."

The High Court also acknowledged Kromberg's views at trial regarding the possibility that the First Amendment did not cover foreign nationals.  "It can fairly be assumed that [Kromberg] would not have said that the prosecution 'could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment' unless that was a tenable argument that the prosecution was entitled to deploy with real prospect of success."  These latest assurances do nothing to change that fact.

A post from Assange's wife, Stella, provided a neat and damning summary of the embassy note.  "The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty. It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution's previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a US citizen.  Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can 'seek to raise' the First Amendment if extradited."

Whether the justices are duly satisfied by the latest diplomatic manoeuvre, one non-binding in any tangible or true sense on prosecutors and judges in the US, awaits testing in the hearing on May 20.  For Assange, the wheels of judicial torture have been prolonged.

The post Faulty Assurances: The Judicial Torture of Assange Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.