NB: Except that it neither was, nor is a mistake, Owen; its deliberate deception. DS
Israel is the main source of terror and instability in the Middle East. But the west continually turns away from this reality
As the G7 issues a statement declaring that Israel has a “right to defend itself”, you have a right to ask if you are losing your mind. Israel launched an unprovoked onslaught on Iran. Its excuse – that Tehran may acquire a nuclear weapon – renders its attack illegal under the UN charter, which forbids wars justified by the claim of a future threat.
“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” declares the G7 statement. Even though Donald Trump’s intelligence chief testified three months ago that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. Even though it’s Israel that actually possesses nuclear weapons, while refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and refusing International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Even though, as progress was being made in nuclear talks between Iran and the US, Israel targeted Iran’s chief negotiator and proceeded to exterminate scientists, including their families, alongside countless other civilians, including children, an athlete, a teacher, a pilates instructor. Even though Israel’s leader is subject to an arrest warrant, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And even though Israel has erased Gaza in a genocidal frenzy, and subjected the illegally occupied and colonised West Bank to an escalating pogrom, attacked southern Lebanon and Beirut, and invaded and occupied Syria.
No country in the Middle East is as great a source of regional instability and terror as Israel: it’s not even close.
Yet even as polling shows that Britons overwhelmingly want no part in this literal crime, we hear the same tunes sung to demonise opponents of the latest carnage. Scottish politicians demanding peace “are siding with a mediaeval theocratic dictatorship”, declares former flagship BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. Recall how opponents of the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya calamities were monstered as lackeys of Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and Muammar Gaddafi. Yet who, Mr Neil, was vindicated – catastrophically so?
Here is a tragedy paid with the blood of an estimated more than 4.5 million human souls – the combined number of direct and indirect deaths in the post-9/11 war zones, according to a Brown University study. There have been no reputational consequences for those who cheered on each calamity, allowing them to walk away whistling from each crime scene demanding yet more violence without shame. About six months before the Iraq invasion, and believing the war in Afghanistan to already be a great success, Neil wrote a column warning “the suburbs of Baghdad are now dotted with secret installations, often posing as hospitals or schools” which were developing chemical and biological weapons and, “most sinister of all, a renewed attempt to develop nuclear weapons”…..
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The violent new world being born is going to horrify you
Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
Seyla Benhabib: Breaking Silence, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King
After the truth-shower 