Neoconservatives continue to advocate for a war with Iran despite its potential consequences and the need for careful strategy.
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
In 2000, the The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) proposed a U.S.-led global security perimeter in 2000, which influenced military strategies and led to the Iraq invasion after 9/11. Today, neoconservatives continue to advocate for a war with Iran despite its potential consequences and the need for careful strategy.) issued a report that proposed establishing a new U.S.-led security perimeter across the globe to protect Western interests and perform the “constabulary” duties associated with “shaping the security environment in critical regions.”
The report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which suggested billions more in the Pentagon budget annually for reimagining military capabilities across the forces, including nuclear and space, was based in part on the Defense Policy Guidance, crafted by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney during the George H. W. Bush Administration “for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”
The report noted that “the process of transformation” that PNAC envisioned, “even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
PNAC, which was founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and had been actively lobbying to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power, got its “Pearl Harbor” a year later. Within two years of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. invaded Iraq, saw Hussein executed, and was well on its way to fulfilling at least one top line goal from “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”: to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.”
Of course the “winning” part never happened. Yet the centrifugal force that was the neoconservative project, which placed several of its founders and signatories at the levers of political and military power inside the George W. Bush Administration (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, Paula Dobriansky, Scooter Libby), was able to perpetuate a Global War on Terror and a U.S. military footprint across the Greater Middle East and Africa that remains to this day.
Why revisit this now? Despite their discredited handiwork overseas (vividly reflected in the vulnerability of 3,400 U.S. troops left over from counterterror operations against ISIS, a militant group created in the vacuum from PNAC’s vaunted Iraq regime change), neoconservatives and their aspirations are still at the very center of today’s foreign policy debates, and they really, really want the U.S. to go to war with Iran.
“You have to figure out which Iranian leaders are making the decisions, and you take them out,” the GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley said following the drone attack on three U.S. Army troops stationed in Jordan on Jan. 29. This wasn’t a one-off. Haley, who shares mega donors with AIPAC, has been neocon-friendly since her days in the Trump administration, when she helped kill the Iran nuclear deal. Her campaign has been heavily dosed with hyperbolic and simultaneous calls for fighting Putin, the mullahs in Iran, and Xi Jinping in China. She is fond of saying things like we have to “punch (Iran) once and punch them hard.”
Haley is part of a longstanding ecosystem of neoconservatives and their attendants in the foreign policy blob who have long identified Iran as a key, if not existential, adversary of both the U.S. and Israel—this was clear in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”—putting it on the current place in the “Axis of Evil,” thanks to George W. Bush speechwriter and neocon David Frum in 2002.
The Biden administration may choose not to retaliate in a big enough way as to set off World War III—all signs this week thankfully point to an effort on both sides, Washington and Tehran, seeking to tamp down the prospects. Even with the U.S. strikes on militia targets in Iraq and Syria on Friday night, “they appeared to stop short of directly targeting Iran or senior leaders of the Revolutionary Guard Quds Force within its borders, as the U.S. tries to prevent the conflict from escalating even further,” according to early AP reporting.
This is no thanks to this pernicious army of the Iran obsessed, who implicitly regard the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel as the “Pearl Harbor” for the final confrontation, if not the regime change, they have long been seeking.
Top on this list is the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which was conceived as an American public relations tool for Israel but made its mark in Washington as a neoconservative counterterrorism think-tank and Iraq War cheerleader after 9/11. With retired military and administration officials like Ret. Gen. H.R. McMaster often fronting the mission, FDD has long advocated for the toppling of the regime in Iran, mostly focused on Tehran’s nuclear program and its threats to Israel.
The killing of U.S troops in Jordan has paved the way for the FDD’s apotheosis, as its fellows (like Mark Dubowitz, Andrea Stricker, Richard Goldberg) have enjoyed mainstream news attention, accusing President Biden of long-standing “appeasement” and demanding he “strike Iran hard.” Their talking points can be heard in the mouths of nearly every single war party hawk who has found his or her way to a microphone or camera following Oct. 7, including but not limited to, John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, Tim Scott, Tom Cotton, and Roger Wicker.
Gen. Frank MacKenzie and retired Admiral James Stavridis lead this conga line, showing up on Fox News, Bloomberg, and NBC News almost daily now.
“Iranian leaders work with Lenin’s dictum that ‘you probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.’ Tehran and its proxies are pressing their attacks because they haven’t confronted steel,” wrote MacKenzie just after the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. MacKenzie boasted that he was the commander of that operation under the Trump administration.
“The Iranians subsequently backed down,” he added in his Wall Street Journal essay. “Here is the lesson: The Iranians’ strategic decision-making is rational. Its leaders understand the threat of violence and its application.”
Meanwhile, Stavridis, who never misses an opportunity to push military solutions onto complex combustible geopolitical problems, has written at least two Bloomberg pieces outlining plans for multi-pronged strikes on Iran and its proxies. After the Jordan strikes, his plans now include attacks on Iranian warships, boarding and seizing an Iranian naval or commercial vessel, targeting Iranian oil and gas platforms in the Arabian Gulf and strikes against Iranian military command-and-control sites, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters.
“If that doesn’t work, the administration is going to have to consider strikes inside Iran,” Stavridis told NBC News on Thursday.
Earlier in January, Stavridis was echoing a familiar call in the message force multiplier vortex—that the U.S. sank the Iranian naval fleet in 1988 during “Operation Praying Mantis.” “Iran got the message,” he said. “Perhaps it is time to send it again.”
Neoconservative forces injected the foreign policy discourse as early as the 1990s with the idea that deposing Saddam Hussein was part of a grander plan to maintain peace and security (U.S. primacy) in the Middle East. They pushed this idea until it became a reality, with 9/11 giving them their opening to make war on Iraq and to push the boundaries of their Middle East vision in the Global War on Terror.
Twenty years later, the Iran piece of the “Axis of Evil” remains intact. There is no doubt that Iran has funded and resourced proxies that have fought against the lingering U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria. There is no doubt Iran has funded and resourced Hamas, which bears the sole responsibility for the horrific Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Yet it is important to put the voices for war with Iran into perspective and not allow them to inflate the threat for their own agenda, which far predates the current crisis and for which motivations are less clearly in the U.S. national interest.
In other words, we cannot afford another war, and if we need to retaliate, it should be after careful deliberation and based on sound strategy, not the saber rattling of zombie neoconservatives and their minions in the blob.
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3,400 Americans are there ostensibly to fight ISIS. But after Sunday’s attacks, they may become the reason we fight Iran
By Paul R. Pillar
The drone attack on Sunday that killed three U.S. service members at an outpost in Jordan near the Syria border is more likely to increase rather than decrease U.S. military involvement in the region.
This is unfortunate, and doubly so coming at a time when the Biden administration was showing signs of considering a withdrawal of the 900 U.S. troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq. Just last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin intimated that a joint U.S.-Iraqi review might lead to a drawdown of at least some of the troops in Iraq. Other reporting points to discussions within the administration about possibly removing the troops now in Syria.
It is unclear why the administration chose this time to consider what was already a long-overdue withdrawal of these troops. The answer probably involves the upsurge in regional violence stemming from Israel’s devastating assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and associated anger against the United States for its backing of Israel. Since the Israeli assault began, U.S. military installations in Iraq have been attacked more than 60 times and those in Syria more than 90 times.
The attacks underscore how much these residual U.S. deployments have entailed costs and risks far out of proportion to any positive gains they can achieve. They have been sitting-duck targets within easy reach of militias and other elements wishing to make a violent anti-U.S. statement. Even without deaths, U.S. service members have paid a price, such as in the form of traumatic brain injuries from missile attacks.
The now-familiar tit-for-tat sequence in which American airstrikes against militias in Iraq or Syria alternate with more militia attacks on the U.S. installations illustrates a perverse form of mission creep. Whatever was the original mission of the U.S. troop presence gets sidelined as protection of the troop presence itself becomes the main concern. The tit-for-tats also carry the risk of escalation into a larger conflict.
This weekend’s attack just across the border in Jordan is likely to become part of the same risk-laden sequence. A White House statement promised to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing.”
This will lead the administration to shelve for the time being any ideas it had about bringing home the troops — out of fear of showing weakness amid the inevitable criticism from domestic political opponents. The better course would be to interpret the attack as one more demonstration of how the troop presence in Syria and Iraq represents a needless vulnerability that ought to be ended sooner rather than later.
The official rationale for the presence on both those countries is to prevent a rise of the group known as Islamic State or ISIS. But the motivations have always involved more than that. The presence in Iraq is in some respects a legacy of the U.S. war begun there in 2003, which has imparted the sense of ownership that often follows a large-scale military intervention. The fixation with Iran and a desire to match Iranian presence and influence in these countries have constituted another motivation.
As for ISIS, although it has shown resilience, it is nowhere near what it was in 2014 when it ruled a de facto mini-state across much of western Iraq and northeastern Syria. If the group ever were to begin approaching that status again, much more than the small U.S. contingents in Syria and Iraq would be needed to counter it. To those who might argue that ISIS already is resurgent, one is entitled to ask exactly what good the presence of those contingents is doing in keeping ISIS down.
With regard to any terrorist group, the foremost U.S. concern ought to be not how the group plays in some local conflict but rather the risk of it striking U.S. interests, either at home or abroad. In that regard, the most relevant fact, repeatedly demonstrated with other terrorist groups in other places, is that anger at a foreign military presence is one of the chief motivations for terrorist attacks.
To the extent that ISIS has been kept down, this is partly due to popular opposition in Iraq and Syria to the group’s brutal methods that it displayed when it had its mini-state. It is partly due to the efforts of security forces in those two countries. And it is partly due to the efforts of the foreign state most extensively involved in those countries — Iran.
Iran is very much an enemy of ISIS. It has been a victim of highly lethal ISIS attacks within Iran, including bombings in the heart of Tehran in 2017 and, earlier this month, an attack on a memorial ceremony in the city of Kerman that killed nearly 100 Iranians. Iran was a major player in the earlier efforts to undo the ISIS mini-state. Combating ISIS is a shared interest of Iran and the United States, as illustrated by the United States reportedly sharing — quite properly, in conformity with the duty to warn — information about the planned ISIS attack in Kerman. It would be in U.S. interests to have Iran continue to do the heavy lifting in holding down ISIS — and to have Iran, not the United States, risk any resulting terrorist reprisals.
Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
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In my recent visit, I met with people who once fought a bitter war against Moscow, but are now the country’s fiercest defenders
Over the course of 24 days – from December 28 to January 20 – I was able to take in the sights and sounds of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as these two cities celebrated both the New Year and Russian Orthodox Christmas (I also got to experience the freezing cold of the Russian winter, which was very much part of the experience!)
I viewed my winter sojourn in Russia as an extension of the journey I began in May 2023, when I embarked on a mission of trying to discover the country’s essence in a manner that could be made discernible to my fellow Americans as sort of an antidote to the poison of Russophobia. The combined experiences of observing the Christmas Eve service hosted by Kirill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in the center of Moscow and watching Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker performed live in St. Petersburg’s renowned Mikhailosky Theatre on Christmas Day, January 7, helped ground me in the importance of family and culture in the lives of the Russian people.
Russia’s mettle, however, can’t be measured by its social and cultural accomplishments alone. The true test of a people comes only when the foundation of their society is threatened, and the nation is called upon to rally together in its collective defense. Amidst all the holiday celebration and fanfare that I witnessed there lurked an underlying reality that Russia was very much a nation at war. This war was defined in the mindset of those people I met not so much in terms of a Russian-Ukrainian conflict as it was an existential struggle between Russia and the collective West – led by the US – in which Ukraine is being used as a proxy.
Let there be no doubt, everyone I spoke with about this conflict was weary. They wanted the fighting to end, and to be able to get on with their lives. But they were all likewise united in their conviction that the war could only end in a Russian victory that resolved once and for all the issues that underpinned the current conflict – blocking NATO expansion into Ukraine, eliminating a Ukrainian armed force that has become a de facto extension of NATO military power, and the extermination of the odious ideology of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism as defined by the legacy of Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
To a person, the Russians I spoke with were insistent that the time for compromise had long passed and that, given the investment in blood and treasure that Moscow had made to date, there is no alternative to a decisive victory. Yes, the Russian people are tired, but they also understand that the war is a necessary evil which has to be endured all the way to a final comprehensive victory if there is ever to be a chance of a lasting peace. I was able to glimpse the character of the Russian people during the portions of my sojourn to Russia that took me out of its two largest metropolitan centers, and to the south of the country – into what I have come to call the “Russian Path of Redemption” – Chechnya, Crimea, Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, and Lugansk.
Redemption is the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil. In the case of Russia’s conflict with Kiev, the six named territories all play a role that precisely matches this definition. Of them, Chechnya stands out as having no geographic, historic, ethic, religious, or political connection with Ukraine. And yet it is with Chechnya that the Russian Path of Redemption begins.
It was the scene of two bloody wars between Moscow and separatists fought between 1994 and the early 2000s (with the final counter-guerilla operations concluding in 2009) that killed tens of thousands of people. The fighting that transpired was bloody and ruthless; little mercy was shown by either side. By 2002, Chechnya’s capital city, Grozny, had been completely leveled.
The rancor and bitterness produced by a conflict that witnessed so much violence between people with different religions, cultures, and languages made the notion of reconciliation all but impossible to imagine. Add to this was the fact that the Chechens possessed a history that lent itself to prejudice and resentment against the Russians, even without the horrors of the two wars. The exile of the Chechen people by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet government during the Second World War saw nearly 610,000 Chechen and Ingush forcibly evicted from their homes and relocated to Central Asia, where nearly a quarter of them died due to poor conditions. The survivors were allowed to return to their homeland in 1957, following Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms. But the resentment generated by the years of suffering was passed down through the generations that followed.
And yet, despite all the negative energy generated by the tragic history of Russian-Chechen relations, the two peoples have found a pathway to peace and prosperity. A visitor to Grozny today is greeted by a city that has been completely rebuilt from the ruins, a place where Russians and Chechens live side-by-side in peace, respectful of their respective linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. I call this transformation “the Chechen miracle”, and yet divine intervention had nothing to do with it. Instead, the Chechen and Russian people were blessed by the leadership of two remarkable men – Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the Chief Mufti (religious leader) of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Akhmad Kadyrov – who realized that continued violence would only hurt the people they were tasked with serving, and that the best chance for peace was for the two to sit down a talk in an effort to find a pathway to peace.
They succeeded.
Today, throughout the Chechen Republic, the visages of Vladimir Putin and Akhmad Kadyrov can be seen on display, side-by-side, in recognition of the role both men played in overcoming the history of violence, mistrust, and resentment that had defined the relationship, and instead forging a new path forward governed by the notion of mutual respect and shared prosperity. The success of their joint work is manifest in the fact that while the Chechen people today maintain their distinct identity, defined in large part by the Muslim faith, they very much identify themselves as being part of the Russian Federation, something that was unthinkable back in the 1990’s when they fought for independence from Russia.
While in Chechnya, I had the opportunity to meet with several prominent Chechen figures, including former deputy interior minister Apti Alaudinov, State Duma member Adam Delimkhanov, chairman of the Chechen republican parliament Magomed Daudov, and the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov. What these four individuals all had in common was that, at some point in their lives, they had taken up arms against Russia. But they were also united in the fact that, at some point during their resistance against Russia during the Second Chechen War, they realized that the cause of an independent Chechen Republic had been hijacked by foreign jihadists whose passion for violence had superseded any logical notion of Chechen nationalism, and instead created the conditions where continued conflict threatened to consume the Chechen people.
“We have witnessed for ourselves how outside parties sought to infect us with their foreign ideology in order to further their larger struggle against Russia,” I was told. “We ended up realizing that the best way to protect ourselves from being destroyed by these foreign agents was to align ourselves with Russia. In doing so, we discovered that the Russians shared our same desire to live in peace, free from outside manipulation. This is why we have made fighting alongside Russia in the Special Military Operation such a high priority. We see in the Banderist forces in Ukraine the same evil that we saw in the foreign jihadists who came to fight in Chechnya. We worked with Russia to destroy this evil back in the early 2000’s, and today we are working with our Russian brothers to destroy the same evil as it has been manifested in Ukraine.”
Actions speak louder than words. Daudov was responsible for organizing, training, and dispatching formations of Chechen fighters to the Donbass, where they played a central role in the liberation of Lugansk, the siege of Mariupol, and in the heavy fighting that took place in Zaporozhye and Donetsk. Delemkhanov commanded Chechen forces in Mariupol, and Alaudinov was given command of joint Russian-Chechen forces in Lugansk, where the courage and commitment of the Chechen soldiers played a major role in Russia’s battlefield victories. In conversations over lunch, Ramzan Kadyrov underscored the narrative described by each of these Chechen leaders – that the Chechens considered themselves to be part of the Russian nation and would willingly sacrifice themselves in defense of Russia. And, as if to drive this point home, Ramzan Kadyrov invited me to join him on stage after lunch as he addressed the 25,000-strong Grozny garrison about the conflict in Ukraine.
If someone had suggested in 2002 that there would come a time in the not-to-distant future where 25,000 Chechen warriors could be assembled in Grozny not for the purpose of fighting against the Russians, but instead fighting side-by-side with the Russians against a common enemy, they would have been dismissed as delusional. And yet I bore personal witness to this very phenomenon, watching in amazement as Ramzan Kadyrov exhorted these heavily armed men to fight for the memory of his father, for their faith, and for the cause of greater Russia.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
Donald Tusk is turning the proud Poles into the prostrate Poles. From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:
In the modern-day “Fortress Europe”, Poland is playing a similar role vis-à-vis Germany as fascist Italy played with the Nazis, who were also junior German partners whose delegated task was to relieve some of the burden upon Berlin for controlling parts of the continent.
New Polish Defense Minister Wladysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who’s a political appointee with absolutely zero military experience, said in an interview with local media that “I assume every scenario, and I take the worst ones most seriously” when asked about the possibility of Russia attacking his country. This is nothing but shameless scaremongering aimed at justifying Poland’s subordination to Germany last week after it informally rubbished its reparations demands and agreed to form a “military Schengen”.
There is a complex history behind Israel’s October 2023 Plan to “Wipe Gaza off the Map”.
It’s Genocide, An Absolute Slaughter:
“We are going to attack Gaza City very broadly soon,” Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said in a nationally broadcast address, without giving a timetable for the attack.”
It’s a criminal undertaking based on Israel’s doctrine of “Justified Vengeance” which was first formulated in 2001.
(See below: my January 2009 article published at the very outset of Israel’s 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Led”)
The “Justified Vengeance” doctrine propounds in no uncertain terms that(despite its limited military capabilities) Palestine rather than Israel is “the Aggressor” and that Israel has the right to defend itself.
“U.S. intelligence say they weren’t aware of an impending Hamas attack.
Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack which has resulted in countless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.
Was a carefully formulated Israeli plan to wage an all out war against Palestinians envisaged prior to the launching by Hamas of “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”?
This was not a failure of Israeli Intelligence, as conveyed by the media. Quite the opposite”
Video. Justified Vengeance and False Flags. Michel Chossudovsky
Lux Media Video recorded on October 16, 2023
Below: detailed analysis and history of Israeli False Flag Operations against the People of Palestine
“…This is the “green light to terror” theme which the Military Intelligence (Ama”n) has been promoting since 1997, when its anti-Oslo line was consolidated. This theme was since repeated again and again by military circles, and eventually became the mantra of Israeli propaganda…
The ‘Foreign Report’ (Jane’s information) of July 12, 2001 disclosed that the Israeli army (under Sharon’s government) has updated its plans for an “all-out assault to smash the Palestinian authority”
The blueprint, titled “The Destruction of the Palestinian Authority and Disarmament of All Armed Forces”, was presented to the Israeli government by chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, on July 8 [2001].
The assault would be launched, at the government’s discretion, after a big suicide bomb attack in Israel, causing widespread deaths and injuries, citing the bloodshed as justification.” (Tanya Reinhart, December 22, 2001)
Ariel Sharon: “A 1948 Style Solution”
According to the Prof. Tanya Reinhart; “Mass expulsion could occur at some later stage of the ground invasion [2002- ], were the Israelis to open up Gaza’s borders to allow for an exodus of population … Expulsion was referred to by Ariel Sharon as the “a 1948 style solution”. For Sharon “it is only necessary to find another state for the Palestinians”. -‘Jordan is Palestine’ – was the phrase that Sharon coined.” (Tanya Reinhart, op cit)
The “Hamas-Mossad Partnership”
What is now unfolding in Gaza is part of a longstanding intelligence agenda, which has been on the drawing-board of successive Israeli governments for more than twenty years. Founded in 1987 with the support of Israel, “The Hamas-Mossad partnership” is confirmed by Netanyahu:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (March 2019 Statement quoted by Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)
“Support” and “Money” for Hamas
“Transferring Money to Hamas” on behalf of Netanyahu is confirmed by a Times of Israel October 8, 2023 Report:
“Hamas was treated as a partner to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority to prevent Abbas from moving towards creating a Palestinian State. Hamas was promoted from a terrorist group to an organization with which Israel conducted negotiations through Egypt, and which was allowed to receive suitcases containing millions of dollars from Qatar through the Gaza crossings.” (emphasis added)
Benjamin Netanyahu’s position defined several years prior to the October 7, 2023 “State of Readiness For War” consists in the total appropriation of Palestine Lands as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland:
“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” (January 2023)
The Role of Mossad
The doctrine of “Justified Vengeance” initiated in 2001, is the cornerstone of Israel’s intelligence narrative. It provides a justification to carry out acts of genocide, with the support of the International community, first in Gaza, then in the West Bank.
These official figures are meaningless, intelligence agencies do not reveal the sources of their funding or the size of their staff (which are in excess of the figures quoted above).
Mossad (Foreign Intelligence) together with Shin Bet (Domestic National Security) and Aman (Military Intelligence) is the main actor in the conduct of “false flag operations”. It’s covert capabilities are extensive. It has over the years infiltrated both Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority, It also exerts –in liaison with US intelligence– control over Al Qaeda operatives, ISIS and Daesh throughout the Middle East.
Mossad’s mandate is to create “divisions” within the Palestinian Resistance Movement, while sustaining fear and routine terrorist false flag events against innocent Israeli civilians, which sustains the legitimacy of the “Justified Vengeance” narrative.
Chronology
Let us briefly review the history, the various stages following the:
Failure of Oslo I and II (1993-95) and The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1995)
2001. “Operation Justified Vengeance”
Presented in July 2001 to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon by IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, under the title:
“The Destruction of the Palestinian Authority and Disarmament of All Armed Forces”.
See the Analysis of Tanya Reinhart and the Jane Report quoted above and in the article below).
“Operation Justified Vengeance” was also referred to as the “Dagan Plan”, named after the late General Meir Dagan, who headed Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency from 2002-2011.
The longer term objective of “Operation Justified Vengeance” (2001) was and remains the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.
2002. Decision to Build the Infamous Apartheid Wall by Sharon government
2004. The Assassination of Yasser Arafat
It was ordered by the Israeli Cabinet in 2003. It was approved by the US which vetoed a United Nations Security Resolution condemning the 2003 Israeli Cabinet decision. It was undertaken by Mossad. (See details in article below).
2005. The Removal, under Orders of PM Ariel Sharon of all Jewish Settlements in Gaza.
Proposed in 2003 by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, implemented in August 2005 and completed in September 2005.
A Jewish population of over 7,000 was relocated. This relocation was required to transform the Gaza Strip into “An Open Air Prison”
2006. The Hamas election victory in January 2006.
Without Arafat, the Israeli military-intelligence architects knew that Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas would loose the elections.
2008-2009. “Operation Cast Lead”
In 2008 the “Bloodshed Justification” was an essential component of the military-intelligence agenda, which was first formulated in the 2001 “Operation Justified Vengeance”:
“The Destruction of the Palestinian Authority and Disarmament of All Armed Forces”
The killing of Palestinian civilians was justified on “humanitarian grounds.” as formulated in the “Operation Justified Vengeance Report”.
***
Michel Chossudovsky, May 15, 2021, October 23, 2023, November 8, 2023,
Below is my article published in early January 2009, at the height of the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead
The Invasion of Gaza:
Part of a Broader Israeli Military-Intelligence Agenda
by Michel Chossudovsky
January 2009
***
“Operation Cast Lead”
The aerial bombings and the ongoing ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli ground forces must be analysed in a historical context. Operation “Cast Lead” [2008] is a carefully planned undertaking, which is part of a broader military-intelligence agenda first formulated by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001:
“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.”(Barak Ravid, Operation “Cast Lead”: Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008)
It was Israel which broke the truce on the day of the US presidential elections, November 4:
“Israel used this distraction to break the ceasefire between itself and Hamas by bombing the Gaza strip. Israel claimed this violation of the ceasefire was to prevent Hamas from digging tunnels into Israeli territory.
The very next day, Israel launched a terrorizing siege of Gaza, cutting off food, fuel, medical supplies and other necessities in an attempt to “subdue” the Palestinians while at the same time engaging in armed incursions.
In response, Hamas and others in Gaza again resorted to firing crude, homemade, and mainly inaccurate rockets into Israel. During the past seven years, these rockets have been responsible for the deaths of 17 Israelis. Over the same time span, Israeli Blitzkrieg assaults have killed thousands of Palestinians, drawing worldwide protest but falling on deaf ears at the UN.” (Shamus Cooke, The Massacre in Palestine and the Threat of a Wider War, Global Research, December 2008)
Planned Humanitarian Disaster
On December 8, [2008] US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was in Tel Aviv for discussions with his Israeli counterparts including the director of Mossad, Meir Dagan.
“Operation Cast Lead” was initiated two days day after Christmas. It was coupled with a carefully designed international Public Relations campaign under the auspices of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Hamas’ military targets are not the main objective. Operation “Cast Lead” is intended, quite deliberately, to trigger civilian casualities.
What we are dealing with is a “planned humanitarian disaster” in Gaza in a densly populated urban area. (See map below)
The longer term objective of this plan, as formulated by Israeli policy makers, is the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestinian lands:
“Terrorize the civilian population, assuring maximal destruction of property and cultural resources… The daily life of the Palestinians must be rendered unbearable: They should be locked up in cities and towns, prevented from exercising normal economic life, cut off from workplaces, schools and hospitals, This will encourage emigration and weaken the resistance to future expulsions” Ur Shlonsky, quoted by Ghali Hassan, Gaza: The World’s Largest Prison, Global Research, 2005)
“Operation Justified Vengeance”
A turning point has been reached. Operation “Cast Lead” is part of the broader military-intelligence operation initiated at the outset of the Ariel Sharon government in 2001. It was under Sharon’s “Operation Justified Vengeance” that F-16 fighter planes were initially used to bomb Palestinian cities.
“Operation Justified Vengeance” was presented in July 2001 to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon by IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, under the title “The Destruction of the Palestinian Authority and Disarmament of All Armed Forces”.
“A contingency plan, codenamed Operation Justified Vengeance, was drawn up last June [2001] to reoccupy all of the West Bank and possibly the Gaza Strip at a likely cost of “hundreds” of Israeli casualties.” (Washington Times, 19 March 2002).
According to Jane’s ‘Foreign Report’ (July 12, 2001) the Israeli army under Sharon had updated its plans for an “all-out assault to smash the Palestinian authority, force out leader Yasser Arafat and kill or detain its army”.
“Bloodshed Justification”
The “Bloodshed Justification” was an essential component of the military-intelligence agenda. The killing of Palestinian civilians was justified on “humanitarian grounds.” Israeli military operations were carefully timed to coincide with the suicide attacks:
“Operation Justified Vengeance” was also referred to as the “Dagan Plan”, named after General (ret.) Meir Dagan, who currently heads Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.
Reserve General Meir Dagan was Sharon’s national security adviser during the 2000 election campaign. The plan was apparently drawn up prior to Sharon’s election as Prime Minister in February 2001. “According to Alex Fishman writing in Yediot Aharonot, the Dagan Plan consisted in destroying the Palestinian authority and putting Yasser Arafat ‘out of the game’.” (Ellis Shulman, “Operation Justified Vengeance”: a Secret Plan to Destroy the Palestinian Authority, March 2001):
“As reported in the Foreign Report [Jane] and disclosed locally by Maariv, Israel’s invasion plan — reportedly dubbed Justified Vengeance — would be launched immediately following the next high-casualty suicide bombing, would last about a month and is expected to result in the death of hundreds of Israelis and thousands of Palestinians. (Ibid, emphasis added)
The “Dagan Plan” envisaged the so-called “cantonization” of Palestinian territories whereby the West Bank and Gaza would be totally cut off from one other, with separate “governments” in each of the territories. Under this scenario, already envisaged in 2001, Israel would:
“negotiate separately with Palestinian forces that are dominant in each territory-Palestinian forces responsible for security, intelligence, and even for the Tanzim (Fatah).” The plan thus closely resembles the idea of “cantonization” of Palestinian territories, put forth by a number of ministers.” Sylvain Cypel, The infamous ‘Dagan Plan’ Sharon’s plan for getting rid of Arafat, Le Monde, December 17, 2001)
From Left to Right: Dagan, Sharon, Halevy
The Dagan Plan has established continuity in the military-intelligence agenda. In the wake of the 2000 elections, Meir Dagan was assigned a key role. “He became Sharon’s “go-between” in security issues with President’s Bush’s special envoys Zinni and Mitchell.” He was subsequently appointed Director of the Mossad by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in August 2002. In the post-Sharon period, he remained head of Mossad. He was reconfirmed in his position as Director of Israeli Intelligence by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in June 2008.
Meir Dagan, in coordination with his US counterparts, has been in charge of various military-intelligence operations. It is worth noting that Meir Dagan as a young Colonel had worked closely with defense minister Ariel Sharon in the raids on Palestinian settlements in Beirut in 1982. The 2009 ground invasion of Gaza, in many regards, bear a canny resemblance to the 1982 military operation led by Sharon and Dagan.
Continuity: From Sharon to Olmert
It is important to focus on a number of key events which have led up to the killings in Gaza under “Operation Cast Lead”:
1. The assassination in November 2004 of Yasser Arafat.
Olmert and Sharon
This assassination had been on the drawing board since 1996 under “Operation Fields of Thorns”.
According to an October 2000 document
“prepared by the security services, at the request of then Prime Minister Ehud Barak, stated that ‘Arafat, the person, is a severe threat to the security of the state [of Israel] and the damage which will result from his disappearance is less than the damage caused by his existence’”. (Tanya Reinhart, Evil Unleashed, Israel’s move to destroy the Palestinian Authority is a calculated plan, long in the making, Global Research, December 2001. Details of the document were published in Ma’ariv, July 6, 2001.).
Arafat’s assassination was ordered in 2003 by the Israeli cabinet. It was approved by the US which vetoed a United Nations Security Resolution condemning the 2003 Israeli Cabinet decision. Reacting to increased Palestinian attacks, in August 2003, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz declared “all out war” on the militants whom he vowed “marked for death.”
“In mid September, Israel’s government passed a law to get rid of Arafat. Israel’s cabinet for political security affairs declared it “a decision to remove Arafat as an obstacle to peace.” Mofaz threatened; “we will choose the right way and the right time to kill Arafat.” Palestinian Minister Saeb Erekat told CNN he thought Arafat was the next target. CNN asked Sharon spokesman Ra’anan Gissan if the vote meant expulsion of Arafat. Gissan clarified; “It doesn’t mean that. The Cabinet has today resolved to remove this obstacle. The time, the method, the ways by which this will take place will be decided separately, and the security services will monitor the situation and make the recommendation about proper action.” (See Trish Shuh, Road Map for a Decease Plan, http://www.mehrnews.com November 9 2005
The assassination of Arafat was part of the 2001 Dagan Plan.
In all likelihood, it was carried out by Israeli Intelligence. It was intended to destroy the Palestinian Authority, foment divisions within Fatah as well as between Fatah and Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas is a Palestinian quisling.
He was installed as leader of Fatah, with the approval of Israel and the US, which finance the Palestinian Authority’s paramilitary and security forces.
2. The removal, under the orders of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005, of all Jewish settlements in Gaza.
A Jewish population of over 7,000 was relocated.
“It is my intention [Sharon] to carry out an evacuation – sorry, a relocation – of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements…. I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza,” Sharon said.” (CBC, March 2004)
The issue of the settlements in Gaza was presented as part of Washington’s “road map to peace”.
Celebrated by the Palestinians as a “victory”, this measure was not directed against the Jewish settlers. Quite the opposite: It was part of the overall covert operation, which consisted in transforming Gaza into a concentration camp. As long as Jewish settlers were living inside Gaza, the objective of sustaining a large barricaded prison territory could not be achieved. The Implementation of “Operation Cast Lead” required “no Jews in Gaza”.
3. The Building of the Infamous Apartheid Wall
This was decided upon at the beginning of the Sharon government in 2002. (See Map below).
4. The Hamas Election Victory in January 2006.
Without Arafat, the Israeli military-intelligence architects knew that Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas would loose the elections. This was part of the scenario, which had been envisaged and analyzed well in advance.
With Hamas in charge in Gaza, using the pretext that Hamas is a terrorist organization, Israel would carry out the process of “cantonization” as formulated under the Dagan plan. Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas would remain formally in charge of the West Bank. The duly elected Hamas government would be confined to the Gaza strip.
Ground Attack, 2008-2009
On January 3, [2009] Israeli tanks and infantry entered Gaza in an all out ground offensive:
“The ground operation was preceded by several hours of heavy artillery fire after dark, igniting targets in flames that burst into the night sky. Machine gun fire rattled as bright tracer rounds flashed through the darkness and the crash of hundreds of shells sent up streaks of fire. (AP, January 3, 2009)
Israeli sources have pointed to a lengthy drawn out military operation. It “won’t be easy and it won’t be short,” said Defense Minister Ehud Barak in a TV address.
Israel is not seeking to oblige Hamas “to cooperate”. What we are dealing with is the implementation of the “Dagan Plan” as initially formulated in 2001, which called for:
“an invasion of Palestinian-controlled territory by some 30,000 Israeli soldiers, with the clearly defined mission of destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian leadership and collecting weaponry currently possessed by the various Palestinian forces, and expelling or killing its military leadership. (Ellis Shulman, op cit, emphasis added)
Nakba 2.0: Mass Expulsion and a Ground Invasion Contemplated
The broader question is whether Israel in consultation with Washington is intent upon triggering a wider war.
Mass expulsion could occur at some later stage of the ground invasion, were the Israelis to open up Gaza’s borders to allow for an exodus of population.
Expulsion was referred to by Ariel Sharon as the “a 1948 style solution”. For Sharon
“it is only necessary to find another state for the Palestinians. -‘Jordan is Palestine’ – was the phrase that Sharon coined.” (Tanya Reinhart, op cit)
The original source of this article is Global Research
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I’m old enough to remember hearing and seeing frequent references to something called “the rule of law.” Then in the post-9/11 era this vital phrase seemed to go the way of our dwindling freedoms, civil liberties and the tattered remnants of our democratic institutions. In the process of aborting the promise of decent human futures for most of the world’s people, the word, “law,” was pushed to the sidelines.
Where once we would have seen many references to the importance of making and enforcing good laws for the benefit of all people, that ideal has pretty much become mute and obsolete from the perspective of our puppeteered governors. When the concept of law is assertively put forward, it usually pertains to weaponized lawfare used in warlike attacks on the reputations, careers and economic viability of those that threaten the interests and authority of the rich and powerful.
The rules-based international order provides cover for the weaponization of law as a means for those with much power to maintain and augment their subordination of subjugated groups lacking access to power. The phrase, “rules-based international order” is repeated again and again in political communications, but especially in top-down communications during this era of rapid civilizational decline.
A rule is frequently much more flexible, fleeting, subjective and ephemeral than a law. All kinds of people, groups and organizations can make rules for a variety of purposes. Rules can be made almost anywhere, anytime. Rules can be made by anyone and rules may or may not be followed. Most of the time there are no serious consequences that flow from breaking a rule.
The requirements for making and enforcing laws are very different from the loose requirement involving rules. Only sovereign entities can make laws of the sort that police are duty-bound to enforce, sometimes to the point of pressing criminal charges when serious infractions occur. These days this kind of sovereign authority is mostly invested, theoretically at least, in countries.
Typically national constitutions situate the exercise of sovereignty in very explicit procedures involving many forms of interaction between people, elections, legislatures and courts. In some countries, where Muslim people predominate, the making, exercise and enforcement of laws draw on principles infused with religious understandings drawn from the Koran.
The United States also affords much room for the merger of politics and religion especially when it comes to the influential role of Christian Zionism in the formulation of public policy. The Christian Zionist role is most often to mobilize public support for US wars in support of the supposed interests of Israel.
Sovereignty and Law in Colonies, Empires and Nation States
Between 1945 and today, the number of countries belonging to the the United Nations went from 50 to almost 200. This near quadrupling of nation states in the world came about largely through the supposed decolonization of European colonies especially in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Indochina and East Asia.
In the dominant system of international law, colonies were not considered sovereign nor were the inhabitants of colonies considered rights-bearing citizens. Rather the people in colonies were classified as disenfranchised wards subject to the sovereign jurisdiction of imperial authority over them. There were very large divides in the laws differentiating colonists from colonizers.
By 1945 Europe was exhausted from fighting two world wars in a period of less than half a century. As a result, European empires came unglued. In some instances decolonization was a relatively peaceful and amiable procedure. In other cases, as in Algeria, Vietnam, and Angola, the breakup was violent on both sides.
European colonies were processed through the new institutions of the United Nations to become the sites of nominally sovereign countries. This process of so-called decolonization, however, was hampered by the imposition of neocolonialist techniques. The continuity of entrenched patterns of subordination was maintained often through the imposition of new techniques especially through the agencies of debt enslavement. The global growth of debt enslavement is one of the main animating factors driving the operation of the rules-based international order.
The close association of various techniques of debt enslavement and the so-called rules-based international order is a big factor energizing countries that were once colonies of European empires to seek alternative banking arrangements. This movement involves the urge of many national governments to get out from underneath the military weight of the US Armed Forces combined with the financial weight of the US dollar and its attending institutions.
The monopolistic role of US dollar and the financial institutions it supports are generating the opposition of the BRICS and the Global South countries in their growing identification with the alliance between Russia, China and Iran. This emerging alternative to the rules-based international order emphasizes national sovereignty as a primary facilitator of national self-determination.
This quest to realize the potential of national sovereignty, however, is running up against those still pushing some of the deceptions integral to the rules-based international order. In recent times the pressure from this quarter to override national sovereignty continues to grow. The other side of the pre-emption of national sovereignty is the designation of topic-based centres of global sovereignty.
An obvious example is the current push by Big Pharma to make the UN’s World Health Organization the site of a claim to global sovereignty in health care and especially in the business of declaring pandemics. The huge scams and frauds associated with the manufactured COVID crisis point the way to more of the same from the hoaxers who operate in and around the WHO.
Quite clearly there is a powerful movement afoot to make the sketchy business of climate change the basis for some sort of topic-based sovereign centre in the style of the World Economic Forum.
The WEF is an unaccountable decision-making venue that, as is well known in Trudeau’s fiefdom of Canada, often pre-empts the sovereignty of national parliaments and legislatures. Canadians, for instance, find their election decisions count for naught when their Parliaments become useless because the big decisions are being made in Davos.
Power Grabs by Inter-Connected Networks of Self-Aggrandizing Swindlers
From what sources does the so-called rules-based order, both national or international, draw its principles, ideas and authorities?
Where do the rules come from?
From the United Nations? From courts of international law. From the World Bank? From treaties and conventions? From the Internet? From the Pentagon? From Labor Relations? From the EU? From law libraries? From stock markets? Black markets? Media cartels? From voting? From Rothschild intrigues? From academic conferences? From the work of fact checkers? From sacred scriptures? From research labs? From all of the above? From none of the above?
When it comes to the recent arrival of something labelled the rules-based international order, the origins lie more in power grabs by inter-connected networks of self-aggrandizing swindlers. As I view it, those who make claims to some kind of deep authority for a “rule-based order”are often seeking easy routes to obtain and augment influence for themselves and for their bosses.
References to rules-based order often comes from the lips of those who have never reckoned genuinely with the the requirements of scientific methodology or with the egalitarian principles integral to the realization of anything approaching democratic means of decision-making.
So let’s get real about what is really going on in the name of the rules-based international order. Let’s consider what this supposed order actually is, as well as what this grandiose phrase is meant to hide and conceal.
One of the keys to the so-called rules-based order is that the rules are decidedly different for different groups. This eclectic approach tends to announce the abandonment of principles emphasizing the application of universality, in other words, of equality before the law. Another key feature of the rules-based order is that there are whole classes of people who are basically exempted from having to adhere to any binding rules or laws at all.
These small groups who are put above the law, tend also to be the groups that by and large make the rules for everyone else. Average people are by and large denied any say whatsoever in deciding any aspect of the international rules-based order.
In the days when the rule of law was confidently placed in the forefront of some government operations, elections were the primary means for governors to obtain informed consent from the governed. These days, however, the role of the media is to deploy deception to produce uniformed consent in order to facilitate political agendas that often go against the basic rights and interests of most people.
Most elections these days are rigged. There are many well-established means of doing this cheating. One of the main techniques is through the exploitation of hackable systems of digital vote counting. Another common feature is the sabotage of elections by well-orchestrated networks of large media cartels.
These communications cartels grossly misrepresent crucial issues central to the formulation of sound public policies. As Julian Assange indicates below, most populations do not like to go to war. Wars happen, nevertheless, because media venues play a major roles in “tricking” the public by publicizing litanies of lies.
The nature of warfare is changing rapidly as multiple governments are made subject to manipulations from above. Increasing this manipulation from above is aimed at eliminating, starving, enfeebling and impoverishing the governments’ own constituents. This phenomenon is well illustrated by the hundreds of millions of deaths and injuries purposely caused worldwide by the coercive pushing on populations of military bioweapons disguised as medical treatments for a supposedly new coronavirus.
The depopulation agenda was advanced in the course of the manufactured COVID crisis.
This depopulation agenda continues to be promoted by the mass media’s 24/7 promotion of war, war and more war. Indeed, the business of mass communications has pretty much become intertwined with an array of mass murder rackets.
In the international rules-based order, there is plenty of room for special sets of rules for particular categories of criminal activity. These underground interactions include child trafficking, pedophilia rings intertwined with elaborate blackmail and espionage operations, the plundering and subsequent sales of human organs, black markets in armaments including weapons of mass destruction, the commerce of drug makers and drug pushers as exploiters of addictions, the smuggling of immigrants, and the killing, buying and selling of the last precious remnants of endangered wildlife.
Although these kinds of activities are outlawed, they are in fact made to form significant elements of the global economy.
Such profitable criminal activities are well integrated into the matrix of the so-called rules-based international order.
The funds generated easily find their way into large banking establishments that often have access to expertise in money laundering. The funds so generated often join other flows of ill-gotten capital into off-shore tax havens whose operations are inconsistent with the rule of law but completely consistent with the rules-based international order.
This so-called “order” exempts the rich from carrying the expense of governments while the much squeezed middle class wage earners are left to bear the cost of paying for government services and the interest payments on government debt paid mostly to the private central bankers in and around the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements. To add insult to injury, the rich walk off with the privatized wealth from enterprises that often depend on substantial public investments along with sweetheart deals among political cronies.
This whole structure of legalized kleptocracy and fraud benefits the few at the expense of the the many. The sinister operation is defended, facilitated and augmented by large contingents of lawyers, prosecutors and judges who conduct their devious dealings behind the ornaments of law but not within the rule of law. The higher one goes up the scale from domestic law into international law, the more sordid, corrupt and deceptive the legal establishments become.
The groups and individuals that have effectively monopolized the largest share of wealth and power in the international rule-based order, mostly got where they are by slipping and sliding around both the laws and the rules. The ability to pull off such evasions often depends on working collaboratively with those charged to enforce the laws and the rules. Federal police operation like the FBI in the United States and Canada’s RCMP pretend to be law enforcement agencies but they are really very corrupt agencies of political theatre meant to advance the interests of their self-interested pay masters.
The ascendant class of serial law breakers tend to rule by transforming all regulatory and enforcement agencies into protection rackets to safeguard their own enterprises and interests. They are under no compunction to follow the rules they often make without accountability…. without obtaining anything resembling the informed consent of the governed.
The small number of people that dominate the governments and the media and the Internet and the courts and the professions and the unions and education and the cultural institutions are mostly servants of a system that concentrates massive political and proprietary control in the hands of a tiny minority. This minority operates above the law. These people are almost never held accountable for violating even the highest order of international criminal law.
The Savagery of Settler Colonies and Especially Israel
The expression of versions of sovereignty, gave legitimacy to “law” long before before the era when claims were made that some sort of rules-based order was the glue that would hold international society together. The concept of sovereignty became manifest in the evolutions of religiously-based ruling dynasties, some of which expanded into empires through conquest and diplomacy. The Aztec Empire of Mexico, or the Egyptian Empire of the Nile Valley, or the Persian Empire at Eurasia’s core, or the Macedonian Empire that briefly extended from Greece all the way to India, or the Chinese Empire, or the archetypal Roman Empire all had rich imperial histories long before the era of national states. The animating cultural force of the ancient empires often enlivens the heritage of the national governments that succeeded them.
Beginning in the 1500s and 1600s European polities, namely Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany created overseas colonies that became the basis of new forms of empire. Together these empires divided up almost the entirety of the Earth’s land mass. The lawyers of this era became very busy developing notions of sovereignty to concentrate law making authority in a few imperial capitals.
Darwinian social science in the Victorian era replaced Enlightenment era principles of universal human equality. Instead of affirming egalitarian ideals, the emerging social sciences ranked human beings on a vertical scale from savagery to barbarism to civilization. This paradigm was adopted by King Leopold of Belgium to justify his claim of the sovereign proprietorship over the Congo Free State in equatorial Africa.
King Leopold persuaded the United States and the European powers to accept his program submitted in 1885. He promised that he would govern the Congo to elevate through education the native savages into civilized people. Once he established his claim, Leopold used his status as absolute dictator to enslave his subjects in the work of rubber plantations.
In Canada it wasn’t until the 1960s that the Dominion government removed the category of savages and barbarians from the complex of laws and policies created specifically for the governance of registered Indians. Under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Indians could henceforth vote and run in national elections, enter into contracts by using their signatures, purchase alcohol, and borrow money in banks.
The maintenance of Darwinian paradigms of savagery and civilization facilitated the making of laws enabling European powers, their corporate extensions and their colonial emigrants to pretty much help themselves to whatever lands and natural resources they wanted on the expanding frontiers of empire. This kleptocratic system was made to be especially ruthless in its treatment of Indigenous peoples in those parts of empire where imperial expansion was accompanied by the migration of large contingents of non-native settlers that overwhelmed the Native peoples numerically, economically and culturally.
These regions where the the Indigenous peoples became small minorities compared to the immigrants and their descendants, have been identified as settler colonies. Many of the settler colonies in North America seceded from their British imperial parent to form the United States in America. The remaining settler colonies in the British Empire including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, were sometimes referred to as White Dominions.
After 1911 many tried to construct the Union of South Africa as a White Dominion similar to, say, Canada. The governments of Canada and South Africa, who collaborated in their governance of Indian reserves and Bantustans, imposed policies that treated Indigenous peoples as uncivilized wards of the state. In the African polity, however, Black people were numerically dominant and eventually asserted against sometimes ruthless settler resistance, their constitutional status as equal individuals in the mix of citizenship with White people.
Israel turns out to have emerged as the most aggressive of all the settler colonies. I can think of no single genocidal event in the history in settler colonies more severe than what we have been witnessing in Gaza since early October. I cannot think of any Indian war or Maori war or Aborigines war or Kaffir war in South Africa to compare with the rapid fire, high-tech assault still underway in Gaza.
The colonization of the Israeli entity got off to a very bad start in 1947-48 after the General Assembly of the United Nations just barely squeezed out a majority vote on Resolution 181. The key features of Resolution 181 were the partition provisions dividing Palestine into to two sections, one for a new Jewish country and the other for a new Arab state. To this day the Arab state has yet to established. This outcome had the result of making many of the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s genocidal “War of Independence” in 1948, into stateless refugees.
From 1948 until today the genocidal assault on the native Palestinians has continued. The stateless refugees of the Gaza concentration camp were subjected to especially ruthless treatment culminating in the genocidal assault initiated in early October of 2023. It is readily apparent to those who have looked at the available evidence that considerable planning for this climactic genocide happened in the secret branches of the US and Israeli governments long before October 7.
The aim has been and remains to rid the Gaza strip of its 2+ million Palestinians inhabitants. The plan remains to exterminate as many Palestinians as possible by a lethal combination of technics, while while simultaneously destroying all housing, infrastructure and life support systems. The plan is to evict all survivors by forcing them to run for their lives away from a sterile death zone that the Jewish supremacists conducting the genocide want to transform into Jewish settlements.
When the Test of Legitimacy Is What You Can Get Away With
It seemed until recently that the US-Israel genocidal assault on Gaza was well within the purposely vague and ill-defined “rules-based international order.” This supposed rules-based order seems to thrive on operating outside the rule of law in the realm where might is right and the test of legitimacy is what you can get away with.
The settler colonialism of Israel was crafted into a defiant display demonstrating how many Israeli Jews have come to believe with some justification that they are not subject to any enforced limitations in their treatment of the Indigenous peoples. Many have come to embrace a self-perception that they are Chosen people considered to be above the law when it comes to the act of de-Palestinianizing Greater Israel.
For them ethnic cleansing was not to be considered a crime but rather a divine calling and a mission. The West Bank settlers with their laissez faire approach to murdering, torturing and jailing Palestinians seem to have become something of a caricature of the Cowboys and Indians culture of the American Wild West.
Then in the final days of 2023 the South African government submitted to the World Court a very solid indictment of Israel, accusing it of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Instituted in 1948, the Genocide Convention was a pioneering example of international criminal law very intertwined with the genesis of the UN’s International Court of Justice. (ICJ)
The ICJ agreed to accept the South African submission. The Court heard South Africa’s verbal arguments on January 11 and the next day it heard lawyers presenting a a defence on behalf of the government of Israel. Apparently Israel had never taken its place in the dock for the accused in any international proceeding.
Apparently up until 12 January, Israel basically ignored and boycotted any proceeding meant to hold them legally accountable for their treatment of the occupied people. The government and most of the people of Israel refused to acknowledge that Palestinians have a right of self-defence. They refused to picture themselves as Occupiers victimizing the Occupied People. Whatever happens, it seems, Jewish Israelis must always see themselves as victims.
Then on January 26 the ICJ came out with a historic ruling that acknowledged that a plausible instance of genocide was occurring in Gaza. The court did not order a cease fire. According to Michel Chossudovsky, the Court opted rather to call on the Netanyahu government to prevent and punish itself for possibly committing genocide.
Like many, I was initially very happy with the Court’s ruling. After years of seeing huge examples of obvious criminality taking place on many fronts at the the highest levels, apparently without legal consequences for the culprits, I wondered if the rule of law on the most important issues of our time had gone completely dormant.
The confidence of high officialdom in Israel that they could justify their obvious genocide by calling Palestinians animals and worse than animals, was hard to even fathom let alone absorb. Seeing hateful genocidal language put in the mouths of the Israeli children’s choir seemed to me like a whole new type of child abuse.
It also came as a shock that amidst all the factionalism among Jewish Israels, there seems to be no significant group focused on ending the genocidal assault because of the insanely lethal and injurious damage being done to Palestinian humans including droves of their children. It was daunting listening to that young Israeli soldier speaking openly about his wish to shoot Israeli children as if this lust to kill was the basis for some kind of wet dream.
Rethinking the ICJ Ruling in Light of the Observation That Netanyahu and His Cabinet Have Been Put in Charge of the Process of Investigating, Preventing and Punishing the Gaza Genocide
It has taken a while to sink in, but my appreciation of the ICJ ruling has dropped a few notches the more I contemplate the argument posed by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky in a running essay in Global Research.ca that he keeps revising since first publishing it on January 29. I currently have the Feb. 4 version in front of me. I’ll reproduce a large portion of the text below. The subtitle introduces the main thesis.
The ICJ “Appoints” Netanyahu to “Prevent” and “Punish” Those Responsible for “Genocidal Acts”
Court Order: “The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;…”
Analysis: What the ICJ judgment intimates is that the “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers (CRRs)” acting on behalf of the State of Israel, namely the members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, are “Innocent”. They cannot “prevent and punish” themselves.
And that is where “Fake Justice” comes in
“Constitutionally Responsible Rulers (CRRs)” Netanyahu, Galant, Ben-Gvir, Katz, Smotrich, et al are the architects of the Genocide. Yet they have been assigned by the ICJ with a mandate “To Prevent and Punish the Direct and Public Incitement to Commit Genocide…”
The CRRs within Netanyahu’s Cabinet acting on behalf of the State of Israel-– who carefully planned prior to October 7, 2023 a genocidal attack against the People of Palestine, have been “appointed” by the ICJ to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent” and “punish”“public officials”, “private individuals”, andmembers of the Military who are carrying out acts of “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”.
Prevention and Punishment is not contemplated against Israel’s Netanyahu Clique of CRRs “who have blood on their hands.”
Under present circumstances, this “take all measures within its power” concept is tantamount to the criminalization of International Law: The CRRs “Criminals in High Office” (Netanayahu et al) are invited to take law enforcement in their own hands.
The option to entrust Netanyahu’s Cabinet with the “Prevent and Punish” assignment was a decision of the World Court. The 17 Judges could have demanded that the Israeli government cease all genocidal actions. They could also have recommended that the “prevent and punish” mandate be assigned to a United Nations body, including the UN Security Council.
The Netanyahu government has ordered the most hideous crimes against the People of Palestine.
And now the World Court has instructed a criminal government led by Netanyahu (who has a criminal record) to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent” and “punish” “public officials, “private individuals” (Article IV) as well as combatants within the Israeli military….
It’s an absurd proposition. It unfortunately disallows Netanyahu to “prevent and punish himself”.
As Prof. Chossudovsky sees it, the ICJ has framed its ruling in ways meant to cushion the executive branch of the Israeli government from prosecution for genocide. The scholar is very suspicious of the role of the Chairman of the World Court, Joan Donoghue, a former lawyer for Hillary Clinton when she was US Secretary of State. Prof. Chossudovsky believes Judge Donoghue is taking signals from the US government and that she should have recused herself from the proceedings for having a conflict of interest.
In setting up an obstacle to the prosecution of the executive branch of the Israeli government, Judge Donoghue is by implication also protecting the executive branch of the US government. The US government can be viewed as a full partner in the Gaza genocide in spite of the unconvincing play acting by some in the Biden administration.
“However, the court did not take the action most desired by South Africa and feared by Israel — that of ordering an immediate, unilateral ceasefire which would have stymied the war effort and indicated that the court believes genocide is actively taking place.”
In contemplating this comments after reading Professor Chossudovsky’s assessment, I pictured the ICJ ruling in a different light. While the ruling will clearly have serious consequences for Israel, some Israelis must have understood the judgment as one that that enabled them to evade what they most feared, namely the “ordering of an immediate, unilateral ceasefire which would have stymied the war effort and indicated that the court believes genocide is actively taking place.”
My thoughts turn to a Zoom discussion I recently watched where journalists in Tel Aviv at Haaretz commented on the ruling. One of the presenters indicated that Israel had just evaded a bullet he had feared would strike Israel with the issuing of the ICJ ruling. After viewing the Haaretz presenter’s comments, the new revelations from Prof. Chossudovsky helped me to I understand better why the journalist might have seen it the way he did.
I also revisited my former assessment of a celebration involving thousands of Israelis in a stadium in Jerusalem where great merriment and even exuberant dancing took place. The conference, which took place after the ICJ ruling, was to anticipate killing and evicting all the Gazan Palestinians as a prelude to the partiers’ goal of transforming Gaza into the site of many new Jewish settlements.
I covered this story of this Israeli real estate party in a recent Substack post. When I put the item together, it did not dawn on me that Itamar Ben-Givir and his colleagues may have well understood the brighter side of the ICJ’s ruling when it comes to the legal position of the Israeli PM and cabinet. Were they celebrating that part of the ruling?
I’ll close with a few thoughts on the instant Israeli demonization of the United Nations Refugee and Work Agency, UNRWA. This UN agency has been a life line for displaced Palestinians not only in Gaza and the West Bank but also in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
Eighteen governments including my government of Canada fell straight in line with withholding funding from UNRWA, the agency carrying the largest burden of the responsibility to provide humanitarian supplies into Gaza at this moment of grave need. To contribute to the holding back of humanitarian aid at this time and in this context may be interpreted as a flirtation with complicity in genocide.
Canada I think is already complicit in genocide because it supplies weapons to the government of Israel. There are also reports that Canada’s special forces unit, Joint Task Force-2, took part with the IDF in military operations in Gaza, As I see it, the complex of Israel Lobby organizations in Canada, but especially the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, CIJA, are also complicit in genocide because they counsel Canada’s people and its government to show contempt for the World Court and the UNRWA.
The CIJA’s actions indicate why the organization should have to register as a lobby for a foreign government and why it should not be treated as a charitable philanthropy capable of issuing receipts for tax exemptions.
All of this resistance to ending the genocide in Gaza causes me to be less optimistic about turning the corner away from the notorious rules-based international order. Many of its protagonists seem to have no problem with aligning themselves with the Israel-US genocide in Gaza as well as with the attackers on Yemen and Lebanon. As I am coming to understand it, however, the weight of worldwide public opinion that is no longer prepared to tolerate the obscenity of open genocide in our midst, is making headway towards a humanitarian approach embracing national sovereignty, multipolarity, and the security that comes from a more robust embrace of the rule of law.
Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr. Anthony Hallis currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from the author
The original source of this article is Global Research
Holding the foreign policy of a country accountable in court, notably when it comes to matters criminal, can be insuperably challenging. Judges traditionally shun making decisions on policy, even though they unofficially do so all the time. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based civil liberties group, was not to be discouraged, most notably regarding the Biden administration’s unflagging support for Israel and its war in Gaza.
In a filing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California last November, the CCR, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the United States, sought an order “requiring that the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense adhere to their duty to prevent, and not further, the unfolding genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.” Such a duty, arising in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, “is judicially enforceable as a peremptory norm of customary international law.”
The complaint alleged that the genocidal conditions in Gaza had “so far been made possible because of unconditional support given [to Israel] by the named official-capacity defendants in this case,” namely, President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
At the time proceedings were initiated, the Israeli campaign in Gaza, launched in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, had already claimed the lives of 11,000 Palestinian civilians, “more than 4,500 of them children, as well as entire families, numerous journalists and UN workers.” The bombardment had crippled critical infrastructure, led to the displacement of 1.6 million persons, and had been “accompanied by a total siege of Gaza, depriving Palestinians in Gaza the conditions of life necessary for human survival: food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity.” (Currently, the displaced number exceeds 2 million; the number of dead towers at 26,000.)
In reaching his decision to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds, Jeffrey S. White admitted it was the “most difficult” of his career. He acknowledged South Africa’s action in the International Court of Justice against Israel, which argues that Israel’s conduct against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip satisfies the elements of genocide.
The January 26 interim order of provisional measures granted by the ICJ explicitly put Israel on notice to comply with the Genocide Convention, punish those responsible for directly and publicly inciting genocide, permit basic humanitarian assistance and essential services to the Gaza Strip, preserve relevant evidence pertaining to potential genocidal acts and submit a report to the ICJ on its compliance within a month. In international law, these interim measures are accepted as binding.
The ICJ also showed some scepticism to arguments that Israel had taken adequate measures to minimise harm to Palestinian civilians and respond to instances where an incitement to genocide could be imputed. None of the measures taken till that point had removed the risk of irreparable harm; to merely assert compliance was not sufficient evidence of it.
In White’s words, “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.” Lawyers representing the government also chose not to cross-examine witnesses, bar one Holocaust scholar who testified that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip could be classed as genocidal. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the claims advanced in this case, involving disputes over foreign policy, raised “fundamentally non-justiciable political questions.” To compel the US government to cease military and financial assistance to Israel were matters “intimately related to foreign policy and national security”.
The plaintiffs had encountered that great limitation articulated by Chief Justice Marshall in 1803: that ‘[q]uestions, in their nature political, or which are, by the constitution and laws, submitted to the executive, can never be made in this court”. To do so would violate the separation of powers. The judiciary was, according to White, “not equipped with the intelligence or the acumen necessary to make foreign policy decisions on behalf of the government.”
Despite being bound by weighty precedent and rulings in previous cases, White concludes with a plea. The ICJ had found it “plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide.” The judge implored the “Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.” Not bad for one lacking intelligence or the acumen necessary to make foreign policy decisions.
While disappointed in White’s ruling, Brad Parker, a senior advisor to one of the organisational plaintiffs, Defense for Children International Palestine, saw the thickest of silver linings. Along with the ICJ decision, “and the increasing recognition that what Israel is carrying out is a genocide and the US is complicit in those genocidal acts, I think the strong language from a US federal court judge increasingly works to isolate Israel’s actions and also bring pressure on the Biden administration to change course.”
To date, the slaughter in Gaza continues. Israeli politicians and military officials persist in claiming that murderously innovative approaches to killing Palestinian civilians are not, by definition, genocidal. But the walls of justifiable impunity, so proudly claimed by Israel in its righteous mission of self-defence, are proving increasingly porous.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Gegen alle Kritik und trotz der katastrophalen Folgen treibt die Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) die Transideologie unerbittlich voran. Am 18. Dezember kündigte die WHO neue Gesundheitsrichtlinien für „trans und genderdiverse“ Menschen an. Dies laufen im Wesentlichen auf die Einnahme von Hormonen und Operationen hinaus. Mit Gesundheit hat dies weniger zu tun – eher mit Verstümmelungen und schwersten psychischen und physischen Folgen, die ein Leben lang anhalten. Dahinter stecken ultraradikale Transaktivistinnen, die willen, dass jeder noch so absurden Selbstdarstellung Rechnung getragen wird. Eine davon ist die „transfeminine Juristin und Bioethikerin“ Florence Ashley, die allen Jugendlichen Pubertätsblocker verabreichen will, um den natürlichen Entwicklungsprozess zu unterbrechen und die Optionen zur freien Geschlechtswahl möglichst lange offenzuhalten.
Obwohl Ashley sogar die potentiell schädlichen Folgen von Pubertätsblockern einräumt, seien diese den zukünftigen Lebensweg doch nicht so stark beeinflussen wie eine ungestörte Pubertät. Mit diesen ebenso unsinnigen wie gemeingefährlichen Ansichten steht sie keineswegs allein. Die Translobby ist mit solchen Wirrköpfen durchsetzt, die eine erschreckende Macht ausüben und nun auch die neuen WHO-Richtlinien erarbeiten sollen. Reem Alsalem, die UN-Sonderberichterstatterin zu Gewalt, insbesondere gegen Frauen und Kinder, kritisierte die völlige Einseitigkeit des 21-köpfigen Gremiums. Es bestehe ausschließlich aus Befürwortern von operativen Geschlechtsangleichungen und Hormonbehandlungen, während keine einzige Stimme vertreten sei, die hier für Vorsicht plädiere. Es seien sogar überhaupt keine Fachleute für die Entwicklung von Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen vertreten.
WHO weiter stramm auf dem woken Irrweg
Tatsächlich hat über die Hälfte überhaupt keinen medizinischen Hintergrund, sondern besteht nur aus irgendwelchen dubiosen „Aktivisten“. Auch von mehreren anderen Seiten wurde kritisiert, dass die jeweiligen Selbstzuschreibungen eines angeblichen Geschlechts, gar nicht hinterfragt, sondern schlicht als Ausgangspunkt für alle weiteren Schritte hin zu einer entsprechenden Anpassung angesehen würden. Genau dies ist auch die Position des geplanten „Selbstbestimmungsgesetzes“ der Ampel-Regierung. Schon Kinder und Jugendliche sollen einmal pro Jahr nach Lust und Laien ihr Geschlecht wechseln und dabei aus einer schier unendlichen Palette von Möglichkeiten auswählen dürfen. Eine obligatorische ärztliche Beratung soll es nicht mehr geben, notfalls sollen die Familiengerichte über die Köpfe von Elternteilen hinweg entscheiden, die diesen Irrsinn ablehnen.
Während in Großbritannien, das sich diesem Wahnsinn besonders intensiv verschrieben hatte, allmählich ein Umdenken einsetzt, hält die WHO am einmal eingeschlagenen Irrweg fest. Dagegen erhebt sich nun jedoch Widerstand. Die Bürgerrechtsorganisation Citizen Go hat am Freitag eine Petition an die Adresse von WHO-Generaldirektor Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gestartet, worin dieser aufgefordert wird, das Projekt einzustellen. Ob er dazu willens und fähig ist, sei dahingestellt. Jedenfalls ist jeder Versuch, der lebenslangen geistigen und körperlichen Verstümmelung von jungen Menschen Einhalt zu gebieten, unterstützenswert.
Für eine noch besser informierte Gegenöffentlichkeit gibt es jetzt die neue ergänzende Suchmaschine „Schwuurbel.de“, die der Programmierer Michael Bründel für alternative Medien und Blogs entwickelt hat. Sie steht jedem kostenlos und ohne Registrierung zur Verfügung. 72 der größten alternativen Medien sind bisher im Suchindex vorhanden und werden weiter ergänzt. Unvermeidliche Kinderkrankheiten werden sicher noch überwunden.
pixabay
Der Entwickler Michael Bründel schreibt:
„Wer im Internet nach Nachrichten, Medien oder Informationen sucht, bekommt heutzutage vor allem Ergebnisse von Mainstream-Medien und offiziellen Stellen angeboten. Mit Schwuurbel.de gibt es jetzt eine Suchmaschine, die für mehr Meinungsvielfalt sorgt. Denn Schwuurbel.de durchsucht politisch alternative Medienseiten, Nachrichtenportale, Videoportale und Blogs.
Für die Demokratie stellt jede Einschränkung des Diskurses eine Gefahr dar. Denn die Gegenöffentlichkeit, also Menschen, die die offiziellen Darstellungen ergänzen oder gar kritisieren, werden so in den Untergrund verbannt. Schwuurbel.de bringt die Vielzahl an kritischen Stimmen wieder ans Licht. Und wichtige Nachrichten und Informationen können damit einfach durchforstet werden – Schwuurbel.de ist sozusagen eine kritische Suchmaschine.“
Ab jetzt wird geschwuurbelt
„Schwuurbel.de (https://schwuurbel.de/) steht allen kostenlos zur Verfügung. Zu Beginn sind 72 der größten alternativen Medien im Suchindex vorhanden, wie zum Beispiel: Apolut, Nachdenkseiten oder Reitschuster. Weitere Seiten werden in Kürze folgen. Und es können auch Vorschläge eingereicht werden – dazu einfach eine E-Mail an info@schwurbeltreff.de senden.“
Michael Bründel erlangte auf zahlreichen Demonstrationen gegen die Einschränkung der Grundrechte mit seiner Kunstfigur ´Captain Future` Bekanntheit. „Anfang 2023 gründete ich SchwurbelTreff.de, die kostenlose Kennenlern-Plattform für Schwurbler und Aluhutträger. Sie hat inzwischen über 9000 Mitglieder, davon sind jeden Tag mehr als 1400 online.
Ursprünglich war diese Suchmaschine auch nur als neues Feature im News-Bereich auf SchwurbelTreff.de gedacht. Doch mir war schnell klar, dass ich diese Funktion jedem, also ohne Registrierung oder Login, sofort zur Verfügung stellen muss. Denn Alternative Medien berichten freier, sachlicher und unabhängiger und helfen uns dabei, unseren Horizont zu erweitern.
Schwuurbel.de macht es jedenfalls ganz einfach, freie unabhängige Medien zu durchsuchen und zu sehen, was die Gegenöffentlichkeit zu einem bestimmten Thema alles zu sagen hat.“
Der Friedensstifter 
