CounterPunch kwam gisteren met een artikel over de demonisering van Ilhan Omar, lid van het VS Huis van Afgevaardigden. Ilhan Omar stelde dat alle misdaden tegen de menselijkheid gelijk moeten worden behandeld wat betreft verantwoordelijkheid en gerechtigheid. (het is daarvoor inderdaad de hoogste tijd, wat zeg ik: we zijn wat dat betreft al zwaar overtijd….*) Daarbij stelde ze dat we ondenkbare wreedheden hebben gezien die zijn gepleegd door de VS, Hamas, Israël, Afghanistan en de Taliban……
Dit schoot zowel een groot deel van de Democraten (de partij van Omar) als de Republikeinen in het verkeerde keelgat en er barstte een storm van verontwaardiging los over haar woorden. Heel smerig stelde men dat Omar de VS vergelijkt met Hamas….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Hamas mocht willen dat het zoveel terreur kon uitoefenen als de VS, dan was het snel afgelopen met de staat Israël!! Ofwel de verontwaardiging is niet alleen hypocriet, maar ook ongelofelijk dom, immers vanaf het moment dat de VS de atoombom onnodig losliet op respectievelijk Hiroshima en Nagasaki heeft deze terreurstaat meer dan 25 miljoen mensen vermoord: -in illegale oorlogen, -door het organiseren van opstanden in derde landen, -door het organiseren van staatsgrepen in landen die niet gehoorzaam aan de hand van de VS liepen, zoals Guatemala, Indonesië, Chili, Honduras, Oekraïne en ga nog maar even door, -het vermoorden van verdachten middels drones, waarbij meer dan 90% van de slachtoffers niet eens werd verdacht en -het opleggen van illegale sancties (illegaal: niet gesteund door de VN) aan ongehoorzame landen, die bijvoorbeeld in Venezuela aan 50.000 mensen het leven heeft gekost….. Vergeleken met het voorgaande is Hamas een padvindersclub……
‘Maar goed’, in de VS tilt men zwaar aan de uitlatingen van Omar, echter op volkomen valse gronden, immers Omar vergeleek met haar uitspraak de VS niet met Hamas, maar noemde landen en organisaties die zich schuldig maken aan misdaden tegen de menselijkheid (jammer trouwens dat Omar Saoedi-Arabië niet noemde, het land dat NB met hulp van de VS een genocide uitvoert op de sjiieten in Jemen….) Voorts moet je dan ook nog kijken naar waarom organisaties als de Taliban en Hamas geweld uitoefenen >> het is immers de taak van elke soevereine natie om zich te verzetten tegen bezetting van haar land tegen buitenlandse indringers en daar is wat betreft Afghanistan en Palestina wel degelijk sprake van….. Anders gezegd of beter gevraagd: was het verzet in Nederland tegen de nazi-Duitse bezetter tijdens WOII terreur of gelegitimeerd verzet?? Dit voorbeeld is des te belangrijker als het gaat om de zogenaamde Politionele Acties van Nederland in Indonesië (een ordinaire koloniale oorlog), uiteraard was Nederland voor de gewone Indonesiërs een bezetter en dan durft men nog steeds te spreken over door Indonesiërs gepleegde oorlogsmisdaden tegen Nederlandse militairen en burgers, terwijl deze mensen als Nederlanders tijdens WOII de bezetter hebben aangevallen……..
Hypocrisie? Zo oud als de mensheid, al maken de ‘moderne machthebbers’ er veel meer werk van!!
Het volgende artikel werd geschreven door Paul Street, hij gaat dieper in op de smerige hypocritische storm die Ilhan Omar over zich heen heeft gekregen:
June 23, 2021
No Comparison: Thoughtcrime Reflections on the Latest Imperial Smackdown of the Nation’s Best Congressperson
Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0
United States political culture is an Orwellian nightmare. Two plus
two equals five in the propaganda spectacle that passes for “democratic”
news and debate here.
Take the latest bipartisan establishment disciplining of Rep. Ilhan
Omar (D-MN), the U.S. House’s most courageous and eloquent member, for
saying this: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice
for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable
atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the
Taliban.”
Omar dared, in the words of The New York Times, “to compare Israel and the United States to Hamas and the Taliban.”
But did she? Look at these two sentences: “There’s nothing quite as
exciting for baseball fans as a no-hitter. We have this season seen no-hitters thrown by
pitchers with the Chicago White Sox, the San Diego Padres, the Detroit
Tigers, the New York Yankees, the Baltimore Orioles, and the Cincinnati
Reds.”
Does this statement compare the White Sox with the Red Sox, the
Padres, the Tigers, the Yankees, the Orioles, and the Reds? No, it makes
an assertion about baseball no-hitters and then includes six teams in a
list of Major League Baseball franchises with a pitcher who threw a
no-hitter this year. For all anyone knows from these 41 words, each one
of these teams is wildly different from the others.
Thoughtcrime 1: Serious Comparison
But, okay, let’s compare. Since Omar’s critics charge comparison, let’s take comparison seriously.
One reason not to make “false equivalencies” between the Taliban (or
Hamas) and the United States is that the former has never been remotely
in the latter’s ballpark when it comes to committing crimes against
humanity. Between direct U.S. slaughter and the U.S. sponsorship,
funding, and equipping of mass slaughter by its client regimes,
prominently including the racist apartheid state of Israel (recipient of
$146 billion in U.S. military and economic funding in FY 2020, helping
make Israel what the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calls “the largest cumulative recipient
of U.S. assistance since World War II”), Washington has murdered tens
of millions of world citizens since August of 1945, when it criminally
and unnecessarily atom-bombed two major Japanese cities. For an
introduction to this criminal record, which is hiding in plain sight for
those willing to look, Google up the following: “No Gun Ri,” “My Lai,”
“many My Lais,” “Operation Tiger Force,” “Abu Ghraib,” “Nissour Square,”
“Fallujah,” “Guantanamo,” “extraordinary rendition,” the “Highway of
Death,” and “Bola Boluk.” Better yet, read my February 2018 Truthdig essay
“The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony” for a
soul-numbing account of this unmatched record of mass-murderous terror
inflicted both directly (as in Korea during the early 1950s, in
Southeast Asia between 1962 and 1975, in Iraq in 1991 and
2003-2011/2017) and indirectly (as in Indonesia, Latin America,
Palestine, Yemen and in countless nations and regions around the world).
Here are some selections from that essay…
It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of
the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world during the last and
the present century. In the early 1950s, for example, the Harry Truman
administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern
Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was
described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:
“The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the
assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or
so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen.
Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War,
told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of
the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed
‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of
another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed
hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war,
flooding farmland and destroying crops … The U.S. dropped 635,000 tons
of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an
incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating
burns to human skin.”
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians,
began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom-bombing of
hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn
the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
The savagery of U.S. foreign policy in the post-WWII era did not
always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and
Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American
Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions
of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese, and
alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later
described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as “the model operation”
for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected
president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged
a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean
military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in
Indonesia in 1965.” As John Pilger noted 13 years ago,
“the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of
Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they
were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto
would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of
natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’” According to
the prolific and brilliant New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, “No single
American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel
Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia.”
Two years and three months after the U.S-sponsored 1973 Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from
the Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford White House to invade the small
island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing,
Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
“To Henry Kissinger,” the human rights attorney Stanley L. Cohen noted five years ago, “the world, particularly Indochina, was very much a small chess game. Civilians were mere pawns ripe for sacrifice through hi-tech weaponry, including biological and chemical warfare, to enforce his worldview at any cost. Millions lost their lives to his cerebral game board” (emphasis added).
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the
oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match the
barbarous and sadistic cruelty of the “Highway of Death,” where the
“global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered
Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded
the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a
barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway,
Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of
vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles
every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered,
every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No
survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything
like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence
officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the
flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces
continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So
many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic
jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims
were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of
tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or
defend.”
The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army
controlled by a formerly U.S.-backed dictator perceived as a threat to
U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed
the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate
America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War
world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush heralded the “war” (really
a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam
Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S.
citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Noam Chomsky observed in
1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by
blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had
devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”
I could go on and on and on some more with terrible tales of
unimaginable horror and mass death inflicted abroad by the U.S.-American
war machine during my lifetime in Southeast Asia (the U.S. killed 3 to 5
million in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between 1962 and 1975), Iraq
(the “world’s leading democracy” killed at least 1 million Iraqis in the
last eight years of this century’s opening decade) and elsewhere.
Since Afghanistan’s Taliban is part of the Omar drama, it seems
germane to mention a forgotten 2009 crime against Afghan humanity that
then U.S. president Barack Obama tried to blame on the Taliban.
Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s
depressingly long list of atrocities in the Muslim world would include
the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk.
Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in
Bola Boluk were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on
Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times
reported, “the governor of Farah Province … said that as many as 130
civilians had been killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and
eyewitness, “the villagers bought two tractor-trailers full of pieces of
human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred.
Everyone at the governor’s cried, watching that shocking scene.”
The Obama administration refused to issue an apology or to
acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility. It initially blamed
the carnage on – get this – “Taliban grenades.” (See Carlotta Gall and
Taimoor Shah, “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War,” New York
Times, May 6, 2009.)
(By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full
apology and fired a White House official because that official had
scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover
of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was
extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential
apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than
100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology but was falsely blamed
on the Taliban.)
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as
follows: “Peace prize? He’s a killer. … Obama has only brought war to
our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of
100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single
home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces
during a late-night raid.
(Obama was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with
France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya,
helping kill more than 25,000 civilians and unleashing mass carnage in
North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black
Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.)
The Taliban, which owes much of its origin to U.S. Cold War
sponsorship of Islamo-terrorist forces on the former Soviet Union’s
southern border, is a despicable terrorist outfit, God knows. There have
long been fully credible reports of its vicious atrocities, including
mass murder, torture, rape, and assassination. Still, it can’t hold a
candle to Superpower (or even to Uncle Sam’s leading client state Israel[1]) when it comes to crippling and killing human beings.
Seat of world history’s most extensive empire, the U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread
across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military
personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.” The U.S.
accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet’s military spending and
has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5
to 50 times over. Last year it increased its “defense” (military
empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China’s,
and nine times higher than Russia’s.
Comparing the Taliban and Hamas to such a massive military Empire is
indeed truly absurd. Their crimes pale before those of world history’s
most lethal Superpower. There’s no comparison.
Thoughtcrime 2: The U.S. is Not a Democracy
Now for a second U.S.-American thoughtcrime.
As I suspect Rep. Omar knows very well (her political survival requires
pretending not to), the United States is not a “democratic country.”
It’s a capitalist plutocracy, a de facto bourgeois class dictatorship
wherein majority progressive public policy opinion is close to
irrelevant in comparison (there’s that word again) to the vastly
superior power of concentrated wealth. If you are interested in how and
why this is so, order and read my 2014 book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy
– a detailed analysis of how the U.S. ruling class rules (I argue that
the commonly cited problem of plutocratic campaign finance is just one
tip of a giant, democracy-freezing capitalist-imperialist iceberg) and
why it matters. In the meantime, stop and think about all the programs
and measures most U.S.-Americans support – Single Payer national health
coverage as a human right, serious voter rights protections, serious
progressive taxation, the restoration of union organizing rights, real
gun control, a serious response to the climate catastrophe (which is
merely the biggest issue of our or any time), and more (the list goes
on) – that have zero chance of being implemented because of the
corporate, financial, and imperial/military-industrial kill switch that
is firmly attached to the U.S. system of supposedly democratic
governance and mass consent-manufacture.
U.S.-Americans don’t even directly elect the nation’s powerful chief
executive (try explaining the preposterous undemocratic Electoral
College system to someone from another country). The extremely powerful
upper chamber of the U.S. Congress (the Senate) so vastly and absurdly overrepresents
the nation’s most rural, white, and reactionary regions that it is now
mathematically possible to put together a Trump-Republifascist Senate
majority on the basis of states representing 17.6% of the nation’s
population. (If liberal and diverse California had the same
population-to-U.S. Senator ratio as super-white and right-wing Wyoming,
it would have 136 U.S. Senators.) The Senate joins with the indirectly
elected president to appoint absurdly powerful Supreme Court justices
for life and now regularly cancels popular bills that manage to get past
the badly gerrymandered lower chamber.
With all due respect, it is transparently false and even absurd to
call the U.S. a “democratic country.” It would take an actual American
revolution for it to become any such thing.
Note
1. “Beginning with its mass expulsion, rape and murder [of Arabs] at the onset of the [1948] Nakba (the Catastrophe),” Stanley L. Cohen wrote five years ago,
“Israel has devoted itself to 68 [now 73] years of non-stop genocide
coming up for air only periodically to retool or to change the nature of
its weaponry of choice. What started out with the expulsion, at
gunpoint, of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral
homeland set in motion a refugee stampede that has grown to more than
seven million displaced and stateless people, providing the world more
than a disturbing glimpse of what was to come decades later in Syria.”
The weapons are largely provided and paid for by the United States. The
is the nuclear-armed judeo-fascist settler and apartheid state opposed
by Hamas, whose crimes pale before those of its enemy and that enemy’s
sponsor, the United States.
================================
* Neem ook het Internationaal Strafhof, belachelijk te zien dat daar vooral mensen worden bericht die niet lekker liggen in de politiek van de VS en andere westerse landen, terwijl de vreselijke oorlogsmisdaden van de VS en haar NAVO-lidstaten onbestraft blijven, ze worden zelfs amper onderzocht…….. We mogen al blij zijn dat dit hof een aantal van de vreselijke misdaden van Israël tegen het verdrukte Palestijnse volk onderzoekt, al vraag ik me af of dit ooit tot een zaak zal leiden……..
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Voor meer berichten over Ilhan Omar, Indonesië, Afghanistan, de Taliban, Israël, Hamas, Irak, Libië, Chili, Hiroshima en/of Jemen, klik op het betreffende label direct onder dit bericht.
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