[News] West Fears ‘Atrocity Upsurge’ While Ignoring Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

consortiumnews.com
<https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/14/west-fears-atrocity-upsurge-while-ignoring-gaza/>
West Fears ‘Atrocity Upsurge’ While Ignoring Gaza
------------------------------

*The problem isn’t “global inaction” to prevent mass atrocities, as The
Guardian claims, writes Jonathan Cook. It’s intense U.S. and U.K. support
for atrocities so long as they bolster their global power.*

Gaza, Oct. 17. (Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif/Fars News/Wikimedia Commons)

*By Jonathan Cook <https://consortiumnews.com/tag/jonathan-cook/>*
*Declassified UK
<https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-west-agonises-over-an-atrocity-upsurge-while-backing-israels-genocide-in-gaza/>*

*H*ow do politicians, diplomats, the media and even the human rights
community keep us politically ignorant, docile and passive – a collective
mindset that prevents us from challenging their power as well as the status
quo they benefit from?

The answer: By constantly misrepresenting reality to us and their own role
in shaping it. And they do it so successfully because, at the same time,
they gaslight us by flaunting the pretence that they crave to make the
world a better place — a better place where, in truth, the unspoken danger
is that, were it to be realised, their own power would be severely
diminished.

A perfect illustration of how this grand deception works was provided in a
report at the weekend in the supposedly progressive *Guardian* newspaper,
headlined,
<https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/dec/08/un-and-us-efforts-to-stop-mass-atrocities-have-waned-activists-warn>
“World faces ‘heightened risk’ of mass atrocities due to global inaction.”

The opening paragraph reports that human rights activists fear the
“international community has given up on intervention efforts to stop mass
atrocities, leading to fears that such occurrences may become the norm
around the world.”

In practice, this “failure,” according to the report, has manifested in an
abandonment by Western states of the principle of R2P — or “responsibility
to protect.” This principle and related “humanitarian” pretexts were used
to justify the U.S. and its allies meddling since the 1990s variously in
Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, with disastrous consequences.

Millions were killed as a result of R2P-type interventions and tens of
millions displaced, leading to mass movements of people that are seen today
by Western states in terms of an “illegal immigration threat.”

*Sustained Massacre*

The context for the human rights community’s concerns, we are told, are
growing abuses of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Both were adopted in the immediate wake of the Second World
War to prevent a repeat of the Nazi holocaust and widespread atrocities
committed against civilians on both sides of the fighting.

One might have assumed, at this point, that such fears have been heightened
— resulting in their being raised at the United Nations — by the most
egregious genocide of modern times: the sustained massacre over two months
of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the wanton destruction of the vast
majority of their homes to drive the survivors out of Gaza and into Egypt.

At least 17,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so
far, most of them women and children. More than 100,000 homes have been
made uninhabitable. Some 2.3 million Palestinians have been herded into a
tiny, ever shrinking space, close to the border with Egypt, denied water,
food and fuel.

This combined act of genocide and ethnic cleansing is the most intense,
visible and industrial — using the very latest and most powerful weaponry
available — in living memory.

But extraordinarily, that does not appear to be the central concern of the
“international community.” According to *The Guardian*, the following are
the global crises primarily driving a steep rise in atrocities:

“The mass killing of civilians in Syria and Ukraine, and the internment of
over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in China, have been followed by
war crimes in Ethiopia, and a resumption of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s
Darfur province, 20 years after the start of the genocide there.”

Notice anything significant about this list? It comprises only mass
atrocities being committed by those not firmly within the U.S. imperial
sphere of subservience.

The mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, which has been in the headlines
for many weeks, cannot be credibly overlooked. So it is mentioned — but
notice how the spotlight is sharply directed away from the present, highly
pertinent events in Israel and Palestine. The genocide in Gaza, which has
driven many millions of protesters on to the streets across Europe and
North America, becomes an afterthought:

“The 7 October Hamas killing of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and the
consequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, in which women and children have
accounted for most of the estimated 16,000 dead, have added to the bloody
chaos.”

*Manifold Deceptions*

Medic carries an injured Palestinian child into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza
City following an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 11. (Atia Darwish, Palestinian
News & Information Agency — Wafa — for APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The deception here is manifold, and not just because Gaza ought to be top
of the list of concerns, not at the bottom.

The formulaic framing in this paragraph is designed — as ever in Western
reporting — to create a false equivalence between Hamas’ actions and
Israel’s, and engender a sense that Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians
is caused, and excused, by Hamas’ preceding mass slaughter of Israelis.

It should hardly need restating that Hamas’ breakout of the prison that is
Gaza — and its predictably dire consequences — was preceded by decades of
Israeli military abuses of Palestinians under military occupation and an
illegal 16-year siege of their territory depriving more than 2 million
people of their freedom, basic rights and dignity.

*Please DONATE
<https://consortiumnews.salsalabs.org/ClassicDonationPage1/index.html>**to CN’S
Winter Fund Drive*

There has been a constant, slow-motion atrocity in Gaza, the West Bank and
East Jerusalem for decades — long before the human rights community, the
U.N. and *The Guardian* raised their new concerns about “a heightened risk
of atrocity crimes.”

There is, too, a clear difference between the exceptional, one-off violence
Hamas was able to wreak on Oct. 7 because of dramatic and unexpected
failures in Israel’s surveillance and control of the Palestinian population
in Gaza and Israel’s intensification of the structural violence of a
decades-long occupation and siege.

These, all too obviously, are not the same things — and they do not pose
even vaguely comparable threats to the status of the Genocide Convention
and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

To suggest otherwise — as all Western reporting does constantly — is to
exaggerate the threat posed to international law by the atrocities
committed by Hamas and dramatically underplay the significance of Israel’s
genocide and ethnic cleansing.

*Weapons Testing Lab*

But there is a far deeper problem with the framing of these concerns. The
critical problem is not “global inaction” over mass atrocities. It is the
opposite: intense Western — chiefly U.S. — support for, and complicity in,
such atrocities.

This problem is highlighted only too clearly by events in Gaza. Which is
precisely why it is included reluctantly, and only as an afterthought, in
the list of threats to international humanitarian law. The U.S. is not
helpless in the unfolding genocide. It is actively facilitating it. In
fact, Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing would be impossible without
not just U.S. collusion but active participation.

The mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is occurring because the U.S. has
supplied many of the heavy-duty bombs razing Gaza’s high-rises and killing
its children. The slaughter is occurring because the U.S. has sent warships
to the region to intimidate neighbouring Arab states and militant groups
into remaining quiet as Gaza’s civilians are murdered.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, for example, is quite capable of ending “global
inaction,” by engaging Israel militarily and drawing Israeli firepower away
from Gaza. But no one in the “international community” presumably wants
that kind of “action.”

The mass slaughter in Gaza is occurring because the U.S. used its veto at
the U.N. Security Council last Friday to block a ceasefire. It is occurring
because the U.S. has funded the Iron Dome missile interception system that
stops Hamas being able to fire rockets on Israeli communities — mirroring
on a tiny scale Israel’s destruction in Gaza — to raise the political
pressure in Israel for a ceasefire.

The slaughter is occurring because Washington has for decades propped up
Israel’s military with the bulk of the U.S. overseas aid budget, and let
Israel use the Palestinian territories as a profitable laboratory
<https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab>
for testing new weapons systems, surveillance techniques and cyber
technology.

*Peace Talks Blocked*

Boris Johnson, then-U.K. prime minister, left, meeting Ukraine’s President
Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, April 9, 2022. (Ukraine government)

The problem here is most definitely not “inaction.” It is that the U.S.
picks and chooses when and how it wants to be active in creating,
sustaining and ending conflicts around the globe.

Noticeably absent from the list of concerns about the spread of atrocities
is the suffering of Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been waging a genocidal
war for years. On average, four Yemeni children
<https://www.unicef.org.uk/press-releases/more-than-11000-children-killed-or-injured-in-yemen-unicef/>
have been killed or maimed each day over the past eight years by Saudi
atrocities.

Why is Yemen overlooked? Because factions there are seen as allies of Iran
and therefore enemies of the West whose lives count for nothing. Because
Riyadh is a critically important U.S. ally and supplier of oil. And because
the U.S. and Britain have been arming the Saudis to the hilt to commit the
genocide there.

Similarly, in Ukraine. The vast majority of the casualties on both sides of
the fighting might have been avoided if peace talks had not been blocked
<https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-russia-talks/> by the U.S. and
Britain in the first weeks after Russia’s invasion.

It was that “action” and others — such as the threatening
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/russia-ukraine-us-invasion-paved-how>
expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders and the West’s flooding of Ukraine
with weapons on the false promise that Nato would have Kyiv’s back — that
ensured nearly two years of war and its tragic death toll.

As with Gaza, the problem has not been inaction, it’s been far too much
action from the U.S. and its lapdogs in Europe of the very kind designed to
assist in slaughter and genocides.

*‘You Must Obey’*

There is, however, a reason why the “international community” is raising
concerns about “atrocity crimes” now, while downplaying or denying the
worst possible atrocity crime – genocide – in Gaza.

And that is because Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 signifies a dangerous
moment for Western domination of the so-called global, rules-based order.
The concern is not really about a rise in mass atrocities. The West is just
fine with atrocities when it commits them or it helps others carry them out.

It is about the West’s increasing difficulty of keeping the rest of the
world weak, intimidated and subdued through the use of its own atrocities.
U.S. military failures in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine — and the growing
self-assurance of Russia and China — are marking out new limits to
Washington’s supremacy.

The truth is that Hamas’ attack on Israel — horrific as its consequences
were — served as a signpost to a different future for many of those who
have lived for decades under the thumb, or more often the boot, of the U.S.
and its allies. They see that it is possible, even as an oppressed, weak,
abused party, to give the bullying global hegemon and its sidekicks a
bloody nose.

What is seen by privileged, complacent Westerners purely in terms of
senseless, barbaric violence is understood by others as a slave revolt – as
an “I am Spartacus” moment.

[See: *JOHN PILGER: We Are Spartacus
<https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/09/john-pilger-we-are-spartacus/>]*

Which is why, just as happened after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so much
of the rest of the world is failing to join the West in its self-righteous
chorus of outrage and condemnation. They view these professions of
indignation as pure hypocrisy.

It is the reason, too, why the U.S. is being so indulgent as Israel goes
about its genocidal rampage in Gaza. The importance for Washington is not
stopping Israel’s atrocities but making sure Israel reasserts its famed
“deterrence” to provide a lesson to those who might be inspired to wage
their own slave revolt.

In front of the cameras, the Biden administration is calling for restraint
and urging Israel to minimise civilian casualties. But behind the scenes,
it is carefully calibrating just how much savagery Israel needs to unleash
to send the right message to the non-Western world: You cannot win. You
must obey.

*Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
<http://www.jonathan-cook.net/>*

*This article is from *Declassified UK <https://www.declassifieduk.org/>*.*
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