Crimes against humanity

The US Administration has escalated its three-year-long war for regime change in Syria by launching air attacks, not authorized by the Syrian government or the UN Security Council, on ISIL positions in Syria; by increasing funding and training of “moderate rebels” in Syria to the tune of $500 million; and by enlisting the support of other countries in a new “coalition of the willing” to do its dirty work. The Syria Solidarity Movement believes that these belligerent US actions amount to a further attempt at regime change in Syria through the back door.

Is this not the ultimate betrayal?

My compatriots, Mr. Abbas has just withdrawn the dagger from deep in the heart of Palestine and placed it firmly unsheathed and ready to cross the jugular. Please don’t allow him to administer the final and fatal cut to our hopes and aspirations.

The taste of betrayal is most bitter because it never comes from your enemies.

 

Treason: The betraying of one’s country… Oxford English Dictionary
 

War Protest at White House 10 a.m. Tuesday
A nonviolent protest has been organized in front of the White House by National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance at 10 a.m. Tuesday, September 23, 2014.
Among those who will be speaking there briefly is Medea Benjamin, who remarked Monday evening:

On September 3, 2014 The Associated Press reported:  “Secretaries of State past and present meet for rare reunion for a museum ground breaking event…a museum and education centre that will demonstrate the ways in which diplomacy matters now and has mattered throughout American history.  Secretary of State John Kerry warned Wednesday against creeping American isolationism, making the case that U.S. global leadership is essential in uncertain times as he hosted a rare public reunion of five of his predecessors.”

Since 2011, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has waged a relentless war within Syrian territory against what it has said from the very beginning was an invasion of heavily armed, foreign-backed sectarian extremists. In retrospect, the transparently ludicrous nature of articles like the Guardian’s “Syria’s rebels unite to oust Assad and push for democracy” is self-evident.

In January of 2004 I visited “Bucca Camp,” a U.S.-run POW camp named for a firefighter lost in the 2001 collapse of  New York’s World Trade Center.  Located near the isolated port city of Umm Qasr,  in southern Iraq, the network of tent prisons had been constructed by U.S. Coalition authorities. Friends of five young men thought to be imprisoned there had begged our three-person Voices delegation to try and visit the camp and find out what had happened to their loved ones.

For five days during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, 16-year old Ahmad Abu-Raida says he was held by Israeli soldiers as a human shield. Repeatedly beaten by the unit that seized him, the youngster describes being forced at gunpoint to enter deserted homes, which could have been booby-trapped, to search for Hamas tunnels.

What else can you fairly call a people who attack a population of refugees confined to a small space surrounded on every side by fences and machine-gun towers, a population with nowhere to run? No, that is not put strongly enough. Not just attack, but use the latest and most ferocious weapons from the American arsenal to slaughter more than 2100 people, including more than 500 children, destroying along the way a major portion of the housing, businesses, and institutions of a poor people.

Obama took to the airwaves yesterday, oh so coincidentally, on the eve of September 11, to roll out his latest “smart war.”  And it comes, oh so coincidentally, just before Congressional midterms when every member of Congress fears like the plague to be painted as a dove, just as happened in 2002 before Bush II took us to war.
Whatever role ISIS plays in this, Syria is certainly the target.  It is telling that when it comes to money, Obama is asking Congress only for funding to train the Syrian “moderate rebels” in that bastion of Sunni moderation, Saudi Arabia.

Netanyahu’s war-turned-genocide in Gaza has backfired badly – his strategy has helped resurrect Hamas, the very movement he tried desperately to crush
Aside from being a major military setback, Israel’s war on Gaza has also disoriented the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu like never before. Since the announcement of a ceasefire on 26 August, his statements appear erratic and particularly uncertain, an expected outcome of the Gaza war.