The old world is dying once again, but the US-Israel axis is wrong to suggest it is slaying monsters. It is the monster
Archiv: Jonathan Cook
War on Gaza: Israel wants to finish the job Washington started after 9/11
In 2007, former Nato commander Wesley Clark recounted a meeting at the Pentagon shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan. An officer told him: âWe are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. Weâre going to start with Iraq, and then weâre going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.â
Clark added of the neoconservatives: âThey wanted us to destabilise the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.â
As I documented in my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, Israel was supposed to carry out a central chunk of Washingtonâs post-Iraq plan, starting with its war on Lebanon in 2006. Israelâs attack there was supposed to drag in Syria and Iran, giving the US a pretext to expand the war.
This was what the US secretary of state of the time, Condoleezza Rice, meant when she spoke of the âbirth pangs of a new Middle Eastâ.
The plan went awry largely because Israel got bogged down in phase one, in Lebanon. It blitzed cities like Beirut with US-supplied bombs, but its soldiers struggled against Hezbollah in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
The West subsequently found other ways to deal with Syria and Libya.
How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism
Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as âAmalekâ â a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.
Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.
Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face â two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name âTwo Nice Jewish Boysâ, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.
One of the podcasters said that âzero people in Israelâ care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israelâs destruction of Gazaâs water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israelâs agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.
In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be âexecuted by shoving too large of an object up their buttsâ.
They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: âIf you gave me a button to just erase Gaza â every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow â I would press it in a second ⊠And I think most Israelis would. They wouldnât talk about it like I am, they wouldnât say âI pressed itâ, but they would press it.â
The 7 years of lies about Assange wonât stop now
For seven years, from the moment Julian Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, they have been telling us we were wrong, that we were paranoid conspiracy theorists. We were told there was no real threat of Assangeâs extradition to the United States, that it was all in our fevered imaginations.
For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and âexpertsâ telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a âmainstreamâ voice was raised in his defence in all that time.