zaterdag 16 april 2022
White House Refuses to Tell What Their Endgame is in Ukraine
She didn’t answer the question and walked away from the podium
The CIA has been secretly training anti-Russian groups in Ukraine since 2015
The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine
The CIA has been secretly training anti-Russian groups in Ukraine since 2015. Everything we know points to the likelihood that includes neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.
"Since 2015, the CIA had been secretly training neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine to serve as insurgent leaders in case Russia ends up invading the country."
https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato
Remember: Why is Israel Amending Its Open-Fire Policy?
JANUARY 3, 2022
Why is Israel Amending Its Open-Fire Policy:
Three Possible Answers
Photograph Source: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit – CC BY-SA 3.0
At the outset, the Israeli military decision to revise its open-fire policies in the occupied West Bank seems puzzling. What would be the logic of giving Israeli soldiers the space to shoot more Palestinians when existing army manuals had already granted them near-total immunity and little legal accountability?
The military’s new rules now allow Israeli soldiers to shoot, even kill, fleeing Palestinian youngsters with live ammunition for allegedly throwing rocks at Israeli ‘civilian’ cars. This also applies to situations where the alleged Palestinian ‘attackers’ are not holding rocks at the time of the shooting.
The reference to ‘civilians’ in the revised army manual applies to armed Israeli Jewish settlers who have colonized the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in defiance of international law and Palestinian sovereignty. These settlers, who often operate as paramilitary forces in direct coordination with the Israeli army, endanger the lives of their own families by residing on occupied Palestinian land. Per Israel’s twisted standards, these violent Israelis, who have killed and wounded numerous Palestinians throughout the years, are ‘civilians’ in need of protection from rock-throwing Palestinian ‘assailants’.
In Israel, throwing rocks is a “serious crime” and Palestinians who throw rocks are “criminals”, according to Liron Libman, Israel’s former chief military prosecutor, commenting on the new rules. For Israelis, there is little disagreement on these assertions, even by those who are questioning the legality of the new rules. The point of contention, according to Libman and others, is that “a person who is fleeing does not present a threat,” though, according to Libman himself, “the new policy could potentially be justified,” The Times of Israel reported.
The ‘debate’ on the new open-fire policy in Israeli media, gives one the false impression that something fundamental has changed in the Israeli army’s relationship with occupied Palestinians. This is not the case at all. There are numerous, daily examples in which Palestinians, including children, are shot and killed with impunity, whether throwing rocks or not, going to school or merely protesting the illegal confiscation of their land by the Israeli military or armed settlers.
In the Palestinian village of Beita, in the northern occupied West Bank, eight unarmed Palestinians have been killedsince May. This small village has been the scene of regular demonstrations against Jewish settlement expansion and against the illegal settlement outpost of Eviatar, in the Palestinian rural area of Mount Sabih. The victims include Muhammad Ali Khabisa, the 28-year-old father of an eight-month-old child, who was shot dead last September.
Though the new rules have placed much emphasis on the status of the supposed Israeli victims, labeling them ‘civilians’, in practice, the Israeli military has used the exact same standard to shoot, maim and kill Palestinian alleged rock-throwers, even when armed settlers are not present.
A famous case, in 2015, involved the killing of a 17-year-old Palestinian teenager, Mohammad Kosba, at the hands of an Israeli army colonel, Yisrael Shomer. The latter alleged that Kosba had thrown a rock at his car. Subsequently, Shomer chased down the Palestinian teenager and shot him in the back, killing him.
The Israeli officer was “censored” for his conduct, not for killing the boy, but for not stopping “in order to aim properly,” according to The Times of Israel. The Israeli military chief prosecutor at the time concluded that “Shomer’s use of deadly force under the framework of the arrest protocol was justified from the circumstances of the incident.”
Israel’s disregard of international law in its targeting of Palestinians is not a secret. Israeli and international human rights groups have repeatedly condemned the Israeli army’s inhumane and barbaric behavior in the occupied territories.
In an extensive report as early as 2014, Amnesty International condemned Israel’s “callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank” over the years. AI said that such killings had taken place “with near total impunity.”
“The frequency and persistence of arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and police officers – and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators – suggests that it is carried out as a matter of policy,” the Amnesty report read. Even Israel’s own rights group, B’tselem, concurs. The organization decried the Israeli army’s “shoot-to-kill policy”, which is also applied to “people who have already been ‘neutralized’”. Indeed, in the case of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian man who was shot point-blank in Al-Khalil (Hebron), by an Israeli military medic, Elor Azaria, in 2016, was not only ‘neutralized’ but also unconscious.
According to B’tselem, Israeli “soldiers and police officers have become judge, jury and executioner”. With this tragic and sinister trajectory in mind, one is left to wonder why the Israeli army would amend its open-fire policy at this particular moment. There are three possible answers:
One, the Israeli government and army are anticipating a surge in Palestinian popular resistance in the coming months, possibly as a result of the massive expansion of illegal settlements and forced evictions in occupied East Jerusalem.
Two, by perfectly aligning the existing open-fire policy with the aggressive shoot-to-kill military practice already in place, Israeli courts would no longer have to contend with any legal repercussions for killing Palestinians, including children, regardless of the circumstances of their murders.
Finally, the revised rules would allow Israel to make a case for itself in response to the open investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC), concerning human rights violations and war crimes in occupied Palestine. Israel’s Attorney General will now argue that no war crimes are taking place in Palestine since the killing of Palestinians is consistent with Israel’s own military conduct and judicial system. Since the ICC is investigating alleged war criminals, not the government itself, Israel hopes that it can spare its own murderers from having to contend with the legal expectations of the Court.
Though the timing of the Israeli military decision to amend its open-fire policy may appear sudden and without much context, the decision is still ominous, nonetheless. When a country’s military decides that shooting a child in the back without any proof that the alleged ‘criminal’ posed any danger whatsoever is a legal act, the international community must take notice.
It is true that Israel operates outside the minimum standards of international and humanitarian laws, but it is the responsibility of the international community to protect Palestinians, whose lives remain precious even if Israel disagrees.
NBC promotes Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion
NBC’s Richard Engel promotes Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion
In a news broadcast Monday evening, NBC’s chief foreign policy correspondent Richard Engel told viewers how “some communities” in Ukraine are preparing for a war with Russia by “taking matters into their own hands.”
The report showed Ukrainian soldiers delivering “basic training for the whole family,” “first aid” and “weapons training” to a small group of Mariupol residents, including children and the elderly. One of them, 79-year-old Valentyna Konstantynovska, wielding an AK-47, was made the face of “Ukrainian resistance” by the world’s newspapers.
Engel left out of his account the fact that the military formation providing Konstantynovska’s training was the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, clearly identifiable by its Wolfsangel insignia used by Hitler’s SS in the Second World War.
The concealed promotion of fascist militias says more about the US-led war drive against Russia over Ukraine than a hundred lying press conferences. Any conflict would not be a war for “democracy” or “self-determination” but a bloodbath of the Russian and Ukrainian working class, designed to dismantle Russia. Far-right forces built up over years with US support would be centrally involved.
The Azov Battalion was founded by the anti-Semite Andriy Biletsky in 2014. It incorporated many members of Biletsky’s former ultranationalist, white supremacist organisations, Patriot of Ukraine and the Social-National Assembly (SNA). These tendencies trace their political roots back to the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), headed by Stepan Bandera, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
During World War II, the OUN and the UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union and carried out massacres of tens of thousands of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians sympathetic to the Soviet Union. After the war, both US and British intelligence services lent support to Bandera and the UPA.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, scores of far-right organisations sprang up in Ukraine, as in all the former Soviet states, drawing on this filthy anti-communist heritage and supported by the imperialist powers. The Viktor Yushchenko government, installed by the US-backed “Orange Revolution” in 2004, declared Bandera a national hero, honoured OUN and UPA fighters and heavily promoted the OUN successor organisation, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the neo-Nazi Svoboda party.
During the “Euromaidan” events of 2013-14, then-US Undersecretary of State for Europe and Asia Victoria Nuland admitted that Washington had spent $5 billion on Ukraine since the 1990s, promoting “democratic skills… civic participation and good governance”—that is, bankrolling any and every political force conducive to US interests.
The Ukrainian far and fascistic right was then mobilised in 2013-14 to overthrow the more pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. The SNA and the Patriot of Ukraine, together with Svoboda and other far-right organisations gathered in the Right Sector umbrella group, played the key role in transforming amorphous anti-government protests into violent confrontations and ultimately a coup.
Substantial evidence suggests that snipers who shot protestors dead were organised by the far-right opposition to inflame the situation.
Yanukovych fled the country on February 21, and the new government swiftly integrated its fascist midwives into the security structures of the state. Svoboda received several key posts, including secretary of the National Security and Defence Council for party co-founder Andriy Parubiy; vice prime minister for Oleksandr Sych; prosecutor-general for Oleh Makhnitskyi and minister of education for Serhiy Kvit.
Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh was offered the position of Parubiy’s deputy but rejected it. He later became an advisor to the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Viktor Muzhenko.
In April 2014, this far-right government authorized the creation of volunteer paramilitary formations to crush resistance in the rest of the country. The Azov Battalion was formed and quickly involved in multiple bloody clashes with pro-Russian separatists in Mariupol, Marinka, Ilovaisk and Novoazovsk. It was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine in November 2014.
In 2015-2016, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights connected Azov with war crimes, including mass looting, unlawful detention and torture.
Since Yanukovych’s ouster, the US and its allies have ensured that the Ukrainian regime, particularly its far-right paramilitaries, remain a significant and threatening force. Billions of dollars have been spent supporting the government and supplying and training its armed forces.
In April 2015, nearly 300 members of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade were sent to Ukraine to train Ukrainian soldiers, including members of the Azov Battalion. They were joined by British, Canadian and Polish soldiers in Operation Fearless Guardian.
That December, President Barack Obama signed into law the 2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act, deliberately omitting an amendment reading, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” The version with the amendment had been passed unanimously by the House of Representatives but not sent to the Senate after pressure from the Pentagon.
With the war drive against Russia again in full swing, the Azov fascists are now dutifully presented on America’s TV screens as the providers of “basic training for the whole family.”
Two essential facts of the Ukraine crisis are underscored by Engel’s report.
First, that Ukraine is being used as a breeding ground for fascist anti-Russian forces, potential provocateurs of a military confrontation in the Donbass, Crimea or across the Russian border. Azov’s founder and then-commander Biletsky denounced the September 2014 ceasefire with Donbass separatists, saying, “If it was a tactical move there is nothing wrong with it... if it’s an attempt to reach an agreement concerning Ukrainian soil with separatists then obviously it’s a betrayal.”
Second, not a single word or image presented by the corporate media in the imperialist countries can be believed. Its journalists are so embedded in the military-security apparatus and foreign policy establishment, especially in the United States, that they serve as a conduit for a state psy-ops operation levelled against the population.
The critical task for the international working class is to consciously reject the propaganda of its governments and take an independent political stand. It can do so by adopting the internationalist, socialist programme opposed to the imperialist powers war plans and the right-wing nationalist governments of Ukraine and Russia outlined every day by the World Socialist Web Site.
Berichten uit Donbass
Interessant is dat deze filmbeelden geboycot worden, op Telegram zijn ze te zien, maar hier niet.
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