Who will bell the cat

Joram Nyathi Group Political Editor
WE live in a very dangerous world. It is a world drenched in blood, confused under the din of propaganda. We live in a world which should be enlightened and war-weary, but is ever chanting war rhythms disguised as songs of peace and greater social justice in the world. We live in a world where endless plumes of smoke and dust from bombed and tumbling multi-storey buildings in Gaza chillingly remind us of the hydrogen bomb, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki after America’s evil deed 69 years ago in 1945.

And in its ghastly blunders, history seems to yield us curious ironies in the face of an unfathomable global disaster. How does one reconcile the fact of fascist Italy and Germany giving us war in 1939 with the possibility of the greatest democracy which helped end that war through hydrogen bombs today marshalling physical and propaganda ammunition for war, just to assert its imperialistic hegemony?

Where is the United Nations, successor to the League of Nations? While the big guys are making all the incendiary propaganda against Russia’s Putin, who is there to invoke the UN Charter’s article on the “responsibility to protect” the small people of Palestine in this most unequal of all wars?

Russia and Gaza give us the two points of a world facing a catastrophe.
The alleged shooting of Malaysia flight MH17 in an already inflamed part of Eastern Ukraine on July 17 shifted the attention of the world from war-shattered spots of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Central African Republic and South Sudan. The gaze of the world shifted to the crash site, and Russia, where US president Barack Obama has for long been crying for an opportunity to fix Putin.

But first, the devastation and holocaust in Gaza. Again there is no mistaking that Israel has long planned this operation against the Palestinian people and Hamas in particular. This has now been made possible by the new regime in Egypt, which has played the reluctant mediator given the close ties between Hamas in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood it has outlawed. This has left the Palestinians without an escape route and completely at the mercy of Israel’s depraved and completely heartless killers.

Israel needed a Sarajevo to launch the operation and it got it on a silver platter with the alleged firing by Hamas of missiles into Israeli territory at the beginning of the month. It was then able to launch its aerial bombardment codenamed “Operation Protective Edge” on July 8. This was escalated a week later on July 18 with the launch of a ground offensive.

The Western media have been complicit in a lot of the criminality going. It was only the UN Commissioner for Human Rights Navy Pillay who came close to condemning Israel, saying what was going on could be classified as “war crimes”. The media talked of “Gaza conflict” as if this were a war between two countries. This allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to talk glibly of a lengthy campaign, difficult days ahead.

More ammunition
The United Nations seemed completely uninterested in the Gaza disaster, making feeble, token appeals for “an immediate ceasefire”, an appeal so feeble that Netanyahu could not hear it amid the chugging of ordnances and the staccato of gunfire. He pushed on. And the effect was left to journalists to show the world the collapsing buildings, mutilated bodies of women and children, wounded donkeys writhing in agony, bombed out UN schools and hospitals and the newly-buried who were not given the peace to rot as new bodies were brought in to claim a space next door.

The US called this self-defence by Israel, a euphemism to say “go ahead and annihilate these Palestinians”. It has just approved fresh supplies of ammunition while Israel has called up 16,000 more reservists! The message is hard to miss; the UN has no time for small nations referred to in its charter, unless you are Israel, or America is on your side, like Ukraine. So no ICC charge against Netanyahu.

The scale of infrastructure destruction in Gaza is staggering. But this man-made catastrophe has been relegated to sport for journalists dodging invisible bullets, and tendentious analysts claiming Hamas’ provocation is sufficient justification for the callous carnage we see every minute in Gaza.

Missing in all this macabre drama is that Bush poodle now enjoying the dubious status of a Middle East “peace envoy”, one Tony Blair’s ambassadorial voice.

When one juxtaposes the man-made disaster in Gaza with the Malaysian air crash in Eastern Ukraine and the attention the world leaders have given to the two incidents, one gets the impression that both could very well have been planned, one as a foil to the other. America would allow Israel to deploy US military equipment and ammunition stockpiled in its territory to destroy humans and infrastructure in Gaza unperturbed while Obama diverted the West’s attention through a properly choreographed anti-Russian propaganda over the Malaysian plane disaster.

Strangulation
There is no doubt that Putin has for a long time been a big headache for America’s quest for global military supremacy and operational unilateralism. Together with China, Russia has vetoed American designs against small nations such as Zimbabwe at the United Nations. They have thwarted equally evil plots against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

They have been the only ones to question America’s integrity in fomenting insurrections and arming rebels in the Middle East and North Africa, the same arming which is now described by the same America as a criminal offence punishable through financial strangulation if carried out by Russia in support of its nationals in Eastern Ukraine, yet America has no moral or legally-defensible interest in arming rebels against an elected president in Syria.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s ignominious fate reminds us again that these guys don’t forgive and they don’t forget. It was a matter of time. Never mind that it was Putin who saved Obama from public embarrassment in his recent impetuous brinksmanship in the nuclear weapons standoff with Iran.

There is a growing scramble for resources in both the Middle East and Africa. And the only forces which can possibly stand in America’s way are China and Russia. The forthcoming US-Africa Summit to be held in the United States this month should be seen in this geopolitical context, not just as a philanthropic gesture by America to end poverty in Africa or to combat terrorism.

More recently tensions have escalated over Crimea and Ukraine. These are deliberate acts of provocation by America as it pushes its defence wall against the Russian border. After losing Crimea, America could not lose Ukraine to Russia again, hence the coup which installed the current junta in Kiev executing a ruthless genocide in the east of the country with the tacit blessing of Obama, to stop a secessionist movement by the pro-Russians. America doesn’t have an insurable interest in that conflict beyond the desire to shrink Russia’s global diplomatic and military influence.

Enter Malaysia
In the same week the Malaysian civilian plane came down on July 17 Russia and fellow BRICS countries had just formed a bank with seed capital of $50 billion. Obviously this has the potential to take a huge chunk of clients states in the developing world from Washington’s International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

What do you do if you are America and you want sole dominion over the universe? You don’t stand arms akimbo in the face of such insolence! You wait for a chance to strike. So in the week you garrote the Russian economy through sanctions you don’t miss an opportunity to propose a $500 billion “defining partnership” of the century with a BRICS member, India. This is classic divide and rule masterstroke also designed to ensure the BRICS bank dies in Russia’s womb.

The alleged shooting down of the Malaysian flight MH17 plane over a contested portion of Eastern Ukraine became the casus belli and a godsend for Obama to deliver a coup de grace against America’s mortal enemy, Russia. Some of us are therefore not surprised by the unseemly haste by Obama to mobilise Nato countries for sanctions against Russia even before investigations into the cause of the Malaysian plane crash can begin. This is to pre-empt the findings of that investigation because those findings are not an issue at all.

It is really shameful how America, while it couldn’t claim the bodies of the deceased, it has appropriated the grief beyond what is decorous, making vexatious demands of Putin as if he were the direct commander of the rebels in Eastern Ukraine. Obama’s catchpenny propaganda as he whipped up emotion for sanctions was nothing short of indecent. And he had the corporate media on his side, calling for the lynching of Putin.

Obama used the basest obscurantism because he couldn’t produce a shred of evidence to prove the enormity of Russia’s culpability or involvement in the Malaysian plane incident. The leaders of the EU, all along reluctant to join America’s headlong roller-coasting for war, and still angry over spying allegations against the Obama administration, were finally dragooned against their better judgment, like a hydra-headed poodle, into Obama’s laager, more out of fear of reprisals than support for any plausible international cause or principle. And then this historical relic from a bygone era, one Daniel Fried, US co-ordinator of sanctions policy, tells the world the EU’s capitulation demonstrates “leadership”!

The free world must recoil in disgust at this heinous perfidy.

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