Ali Velshi - anchored in Reality

 Many TV “anchors” evoke keel-hauling as appropriate recognition for their work. Algorithm-picked by WASPy bean counters, they spell out infantile scripts and ask idiotic, loaded questions that pander to their proprietors’ whims, betraying their ignorance and bias whenever their interviewees stray off script. 

In the absence of paid, real journalism opportunities, it’s understandable that journalists accept such jobs. However, we do not give Emmy’s to “resting” actors for their recitation of the day’s specials, and so we should also restrain our adulation for those who front wannabe news programs. 

A notable exception is Ali Velshi, who like his predecessor, and fellow Canadian, Peter Jennings, has a knowledge of world affairs and the strength of character to avoid pandering to herd-think.  Ironically Velshi arrived to take up his CNN position as the 9-11 bombings brought down the twin towers, which inaugurated the redoubled era of doublethink in the media that we have never recovered from. 

Speaking from experience, it was career-halting thoughtcrime to mention that there was no evidence at all for Saddam Hussein’s involvement, let alone to mention previous US support for the Afghan fundamentalists who transitioned from “freedom fighters” to “terrorists, when they switched their “primary contradiction” from the USSR to the US.

At the 66th floor of the World Trade Center the FPA invited Velshi to tell us about his new book, Small Acts of Courage It is an entertaining and informative work that ties his extended family history to  geo-politics and exemplifies how journalists should look at the world. Velshi’s family history does not determine his world view, but it certainly informs and illustrates it.

Velshi’s life is a cross section of British Imperial history. His family were originally from (British) India and involved with Gandhi in the struggle for civil rights for Indian subjects in South Africa. It is indicative of Ali’s objectivity that he carefully notes that that struggle did not then extend to rights for black South Africans. 

The family’s political activity was a good try, but Apartheid was developing nonetheless, and squeezed out of its property, they moved on to British East Africa, and then on to British North America, or Canada, which, under the premiership of Pierre Trudeau had become the effective the spiritual head of the Commonwealth, establishing standards of genuine multicultural cohabitation both internally and internationally. The UK itself of course had retreated into the xenophobic isolation from which it has only occasionally emerged.

In recognition of Velshi’s exemplary journalism, his book and his “purple heart,” for the rubber bullet he took when covering a “Black Lives Matter” in Milwaukee, the FPA also presented him with its “Sharp Pen Award.” 

Ali brought genuine journalism to the small screen, with CNN, Al Jazeera, and MSNBC. He even took screen financial journalism to a new level above stock pumping. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Again cutting out from the lemming flow, when he went to Minneapolis to cover the protests about Floyd, he did not lazily and pejoratively call them “riots.” He was covering what he stresses was a non-violent demonstration when a police rubber bullet hit him in the leg and brought him down to the enthusiastic applause of Donald Trump.

Maybe TV anchors should start wearing splints on their legs in emulation of the MAGA’s cultists’ ear bandages? In his conclusion, he prescribes “Citizenship is something you have to practice. It’s a muscle that atrophies if you don’t use it, and if it does, other people will be willing to take advantage of its weakness.” 

To pastiche an imperial poet, if you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs, then you might win the FPA’s Sharp Pen Award.”

The TLS 14 May had a review of Kim Wagner's book in the US- Filippino war and commented justly, on the failures of Western Journalism. It made me think of the coverage of Gaza and the Israeli slaughter there,which poured vitriolic scorn and it recalled how since October 7 Western newsdesks have taken uncritically as gospel outright propaganda from the IOF and hysterical fiction from religious fanatics (Zaka) including mass rapes, burnt babies, hearing the sound of corpses being raped  and not noticing massive civilian casualties.

Mark Twain’s merciless interrogation of official dispatches from the scene of the slaughter, “Comments on the Moro Massacre, March 12 1906.” shows objective journalism is possible.

Twain had immediately seen the bloody holes in the official account, and I have used his piece with journalism students often. “The enemy numbered six hundred -- including women and children -- and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” he wrote, for which thought -crime he would probably have any invitations and awards withdrawn.




A Twain-style interrogation of gloating reports of military triumphs that celebrated the rescue of four Israeli hostages at the cost of four others accidentally killed and hundreds of Palestinian civilians “including women and children” would be welcome.




https://www.the-tls.co.uk/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/massacre-in-the-clouds-kim-a-wagner-book-review-adam-hochschild/

"Comments on the Moro Massacre"

by Samuel Clemens (March 12, 1906)

Huckleberry Finn 

From Voices of A People's History, edited by Zinn and Arnove

This incident bum upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows:

A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, and very difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devious and difficult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not specified, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp acclivity by tackle a distance of some three hundred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the battle began. Our soldiers numbered five hundred and forty. They were assisted by auxiliaries consisting of a detachment of native constabulary in our pay—their numbers not given—and by a naval detachment, whose numbers are not stated. But apparently the contending parties were about equal as to number— six hundred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hundred men, women and children in the bottom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, 50 feet.

Gen. Wood's order was, "Kill or capture the six hundred."

The battle began—it is officially called by that name—our forces firing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of precision; the savages furiously returning the fire, probably with brickbats—though this is merely a surmise of mine, as the weapons used by the savages are not nominated in the cablegram. Heretofore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly; also ineffectual trade-muskets when they had any.

The official report stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.

General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been, "Kill or capture those savages." Apparently our little army considered that the "or" left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there—the taste of Christian butchers.

The official report quite properly extolled and magnified the "heroism" and "gallantry" of our troops; lamented the loss of the fifteen who perished, and elaborated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suffered injury, and even minutely and faithfully described the nature of the wounds, in the interest of future historians of the United States. It mentioned that a private had one of bis elbows scraped by a missile, and the private's name was mentioned. Another private had the end of his nose scraped by a missile. His name was also mentioned—by cable, at one dollar and fifty cents a word.

Next day's news confirmed the previous day's report and named our fifteen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now consider two or three details of our military history. In one of the great battles of the Civil War ten per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving three hundred and fifty thousand sound and all right for further adventures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred and sixty-eight men out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the hospitals and camps. We did not exterminate the Spaniards—far from it. In each engagement we left an average of two per cent of the enemy killed or crippled on the field.

Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded—counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred—including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

Now then, how has it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants, on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon our vast achievement. Next days additional statistics and particulars appeared in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday and Saturday, nobody said a word about the "battle." Ordinarily those columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves. So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion—that was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. If I know President Roosevelt—and I am sure I do—this utterance cost him more pain and shame than any other that ever issued from his pen or his mouth. I am far from blaming him. If I had been in his place my official duty would have compelled me to say what he said. It was a convention, an old tradition, and he had to be loyal to it. There was no help for it. This is what he said:

Washington, March 10.

Wood, Manila:—I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.

(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt

His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines—that is to say, they had dishonored it.

The next day, Sunday,—which was yesterday—the cable brought us additional news—still more splendid news—still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this information at us in the stentorian capitals: "women slain in moro slaughter."

"Slaughter" is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged Dictionary for this occasion. The next display line says:

"With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together."

They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children—merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.

The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:

"Death List is Now 900."

I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!

The next heading explains how safely our daring soldiers were located. It says:

“Impossible to Tell Sexes Apart in Fierce Battle on Top of Mount Dajo.”

The naked savages were so far away, down in the bottom of that trap, that our soldiers could not tell the breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of a man—so far away that they couldn’t tell a toddling little child from a black six-footer. This was by all odds the least dangerous battle that Christian soldiers of any nationality were ever engaged in.

The next heading says:

“Fighting for Four Days.”

So our men were at it four days instead of a day and a half. It was a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory. Those savages fighting for their liberties had the four days too, but it must have been a sorrowful time for them. Every day they saw two hundred and twenty- five of their number slain, and this provided them grief and mourning for the night—and doubtless without even the relief and consolation of knowing that in the meantime they had slain four of their enemies and wounded some more on the elbow and the nose.

The closing heading says:

“Lieutenant Johnson Blown from Parapet by Exploding Artillery Gallantly Leading Charge.”

Lieutenant Johnson has pervaded the cablegrams from the first. He and his wound have sparkled around through them like the serpentine thread of fire that goes excursioning through the black crisp fabric of a fragment of burnt paper. It reminds one of Gillette’s comedy farce of a few years ago, “Too Much Johnson.” Apparently Johnson was the only wounded man on our side whose wound was worth anything as an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any similarly colossal event since “Humpty Dumpty” fell off the wall and got injured. The official dispatches do not know which to admire most, Johnson’s adorable wound or the nine hundred murders. The ecstasies flowing from Army Headquarters on the other side of the globe to the White House, at a dollar and a half a word, have set fire to similar ecstasies in the President’s breast. It appears that the immortally wounded was a Rough Rider under Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt at San Juan Hill—that extinguisher of Waterloo—when the Colonel of the regiment, the present Major General Dr. Leonard Wood, went to the rear to bring up the pills and missed the fight. The President has a warm place in his heart for anybody who was present at that bloody Collision of military solar systems, and so he lost no time in cabling to the wounded hero, “How are you?” And got a cable answer, “Fine, thanks.” This is historical. This will go down to posterity.

Johnson was wounded in the shoulder with a Slug. The slug was in a shell—for the account says the damage was caused by an exploding shell which blew Johnson off the rim. The people down in the hole had no artillery; therefore it was our artillery that blew Johnson off the rim. And so it is now a matter of historical record that the only officer of ours who acquired a wound of advertising dimensions got it at our hands, not the enemy’s. It seems more than probable that if we had placed our soldiers out of the way of our own weapons, we should have come out of the most extraordinary battle in all history without a scratch.

The ominous paralysis continues. There has been a slight sprinkle—an exceedingly slight sprinkle—in the correspondence columns, of angry rebukes of the President for calling this cowardly massacre a “brilliant feat of arms,” and for praising our butchers for “holding up the honor of the flag” in that singular way; but there is hardly a ghost of a whisper about the feat of arms in the editorial columns of the papers.

I hope that this silence will continue. It is about as eloquent and as damaging and effective as the most indignant words could be, I think. When a man is sleeping in a noise, his sleep goes placidly on; but if the noise stops, the stillness wakes him. This silence has continued five days now. Surely it must be waking the drowsy nation. Surely the nation must be wondering what it means. A five-day silence following a world-astonishing event has not happened on this planet since the daily newspaper was invented.

At a luncheon party of men convened yesterday to God-speed George Harvey, who is leaving to-day for a vacation in Europe, all the talk was about the brilliant feat of arms; and no one had anything to say about it that either the President or Major General Dr. Wood, or the damaged Johnson, would regard as complimentary, or as proper comment to put into our histories. Harvey said he believed that the shock and shame of this episode would eat down deeper and deeper into the hearts of the nation and fester there and produce results. He believed it would destroy the Republican party and President Roosevelt. I cannot believe that the prediction will come true, for the reason that prophecies which promise valuable things, desirable things, good things, worthy things, never come true. Prophecies of this kind are like wars fought in a good cause—they are so rare that they don’t count.

Day before yesterday the cable-note from the happy General Dr. Wood was still all glorious. There was still proud mention and elaboration of what was called the “desperate hand-to-hand fight.”—Doctor Wood not seeming to suspect that he was giving himself away, as the phrase goes—since if there was any very desperate hand-to-hand fighting it would necessarily happen that nine hundred hand-to-hand fighters, if really desperate, would surely be able to kill more than fifteen of our men before their last man and woman and child perished.

Very well, there was a new note in the dispatches yesterday afternoon—just a faint suggestion that Dr. Wood was getting ready to lower his tone and begin to apologize and explain. He announces that he assumes full responsibility for the fight. It indicates that he is aware that there is a lurking disposition here amidst all this silence to blame somebody. He says there was “no wanton destruction of women and children in the fight, though many of them were killed by force of necessity because the Moros used them as shields in the hand-to-hand fighting.”

This explanation is better than none; indeed it is considerably better than none. Yet if there was so much hand-to-hand fighting there must have arrived a time, toward the end of the four days’ butchery, when only one native was left alive. We had six hundred men present; we had lost only fifteen; why did the six hundred kill that remaining man—or woman, or child?

Dr. Wood will find that explaining things is not in his line. He will find that where a man has the proper spirit in him and the proper force at his command, it is easier to massacre nine hundred unarmed animals than it is to explain why he made it so remorselessly complete. Next he furnishes us this sudden burst of unconscious humor, which shows that he ought to edit his reports before he cables them:

“Many of the Moros feigned death and butchered the American hospital men who were relieving the wounded.”

We have the curious spectacle of hospital men going around trying to relieve the wounded savages—for what reason? The savages were all massacred. The plain intention was to massacre them all and leave none alive. Then where was the use in furnishing mere temporary relief to a person who was presently to be exterminated? The dispatches call this battue a “battle.” In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. In a battle there are always as many as five wounded men to one killed outright. When this so-called battle was over, there were certainly not fewer than two hundred wounded savages lying on the field. What became of them? Since not one savage was left alive!

The inference seems plain. We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering those helpless people.

The President’s joy over the splendid achievement of his fragrant pet, General Wood, brings to mind an earlier presidential ecstasy. When the news came, in 1901, that Colonel Funston had penetrated to the refuge of the patriot, Aguinaldo, in the mountains, and had captured him by the use of these arts, to wit: by forgery, by lies, by disguising his military marauders in the uniform of the enemy, by pretending to be friends of Aguinaldo’s and by disarming suspicion by cordially shaking hands with Aguinaldo’s officers and in that moment shooting them down—when the cablegram announcing this “brilliant feat of arms” reached the White House, the newspapers said that that meekest and mildest and gentlest and least masculine of men, President McKinley, could not control his joy and gratitude, but was obliged to express it in motions resembling a dance. Also President McKinley expressed his admiration in another way. He instantly shot that militia Colonel aloft over the heads of a hundred clean and honorable veteran officers of the army and made him a Brigadier General in the regular service, and clothed him in the honorable uniform of that rank, thus disgracing the uniform, the flag, the nation, and himself.

Wood was an army surgeon, during several years, out West among the Indian hostiles. Roosevelt got acquainted with him and fell in love with him. When Roosevelt was offered the colonelcy of a regiment in the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish war, he took the place of Lieutenant Colonel and used his influence to get the higher place for Wood. After the war Wood became our Governor General in Cuba and proceeded to make a mephitic record for himself. Under President Roosevelt, this doctor has been pushed and crowded along higher and higher in the military service—always over the heads of a number of better men—and at last when Roosevelt wanted to make him a Major General in the regular army (with only five other Major Generals between him and the supreme command) and knew, or believed, that the Senate would not confirm Wood’s nomination to that great place, he accomplished Wood’s appointment by a very unworthy device. He could appoint Wood himself, and make the appointment good, between sessions of Congress. There was no such opportunity, but he invented one. A special session was closing at noon. When the gavel fell extinguishing the special session, a regular session began instantly. Roosevelt claimed that there was an interval there determinable as the twentieth of a second by a stop-watch, and that during that interval no Congress was in session. By this subterfuge he foisted this discredited doctor upon the army and the nation, and the Senate hadn’t spirit enough to repudiate it.

Footnotes

1 Samuel Clemens, "Comments on the Moro Massacre" (March 12, 1906). Fust published in Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924). Reprinted in Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), pp. 170-73. From the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Chinese Whispers

 https://www.youtube.com/live/432fKLGdy_4?feature=share

It's the Law! Whether Russia or the US!

 Ian Williams

WRMEA June July 2022

 WHETHER THE UNITED NATIONS can survive this “Special Military Operation” on a member state is a moot point. The invasion of Ukraine is a direct challenge to the whole 1945 world order enshrined in the U.N. Charter. And that is not good news for people like the Palestinians, whose advocates and diplomats have invoked the “unique legitimacy” of the U.N. and its refusal to authorize Israel’s acquisition of territory by force. The closest parallel is the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, where the U.N.’s response was entirely legal if perhaps ill-advised in subcontracting the details to the klutzes in Washington.

No friend of the Palestinians should wield “What about?” to justify Vladimir Putin’s illegal aggression on Ukraine, let alone the illegal and inhumane ways in which he has waged that war. But it is indeed legitimate to raise the questions in Washington, although the purpose should be to hitch Palestinian issues to the Ukrainian bandwagon, not to give Putin a “Get-out-of-The-Hague-Free” card in the Superpower monopoly game.

For half a century, the U.S. veto has vitiated the Palestinian cause at the U.N., so it was almost a coming of age for Moscow when the General Assembly vote on Russia’s veto against the Ukraine Security Council Resolution was as badly supported as previous U.S. vetoes on behalf of Israel.

However, U.S. diplomats—and media— were making no such odious comparisons as they crowed about Putin’s lack of support. Admittedly the reportage usually added (very) small print to the self-congratulations, that General Assembly resolutions are “not legally binding.” Archivists in the State Department could remind them that the reason for their alleged lack of effect is that for 30 years the U.S. has eroded their standing by declaring them as “not legally binding.”

That was, of course, because most such resolutions condemned U.S. vetoes protecting Israel. In the U.S. presentations, somehow the General Assembly resolution partitioning mandatory Palestine and setting up a Jewish state was indeed as binding and unalterable as the Laws of the Medes and Persians. But then, the Uniting for Peace resolutions were legally effective enough to fight the Korean War— until Palestine resurrected the procedure and Washington denigrated it.

Washington is not alone in suffocating in the stink of its own hypocrisy. Russia claims its veto from the U.N. Charter, whose core principle is a ban on “the acquisition of territory by force” accompanying the principle that all sovereign states are equal. Of course, the veto means that some states are more equal than others, but the U.N. Charter did not give Russia a permanent seat on the Security Council. That privilege belonged to the U.S.S.R., which was with Ukraine (and Belarus!), a founding member of the U.N. in 1945. The U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, after which Moscow usurped the seat. There was no formal vote on it, but the diplomatic identity theft went unchallenged, but not un-noticed, at the time. U.N. diplomats did discuss it but, like abuse within the family, decided that discretion was the best path.

Even so, albeit 30 years on, it is a useful point to make against Putin’s specious legalism of a “special military operation” against a state he claims is not really a country. However, it is not practical to remove Moscow from the Security Council, although Russia’s removal from the Human Rights Council sets an interesting precedent for a challenge to its delegation’s credentials for the General Assembly. 

Secretariat inactivity apart, U.N. agencies of every description have responded to the war with material help and facilitated the rescue of civilians under siege by Russian forces, but U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has ducked the chance to “name and shame” and has instead been the soul of wriggly circumspection. That might have been acceptable if he were keeping his powder dry ready for a big diplomatic push. A U.N. Secretary-General has a role, indeed a duty, to provide a ladder for preposterous politicians like Putin to climb down from the tree in which they have trapped themselves.

Sadly, it took several months to get Guterres to attend to the war in person, without a ladder, and then only after hundreds of former and present U.N. luminaries signed a letter demanding action. When he went to the region, he raised eyebrows—and hackles—by calling on Putin first rather than the obvious victim. The Russians showed their appreciation by rocketing Kyiv within hours of Guterres landing there. Anyone who thinks that was an accident will maintain that the Black Sea flagship Moskva was hit by a stray iceberg. Belatedly Guterres gave the firm U.N. position that “in line with the resolutions passed by the General Assembly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its territorial integrity and against the Charter of the United Nations.” He added “There is one thing that is true and obvious, and that no arguments can change: We have not Ukrainian troops in the territory of the Russian Federation, but we have Russian

troops in the territory of [Ukraine].”

During the war, Russian troops have breached numerous international conventions with attacks on civilians, in voluntary transfers of population, looted cultural property and so on ad infinitum. Whatever you think of Russian military prowess, it is not a People’s War as Mao or Ho Chi Minh preached, and, as far as winning hearts and minds go, the Russophone Ukrainians in the East, who have borne the brunt of the Special Military Operation, have been vociferously inveighing against their aspirant liberators—in Russian.

One small bright spot was the successful move by Liechtenstein, ironically endorsed by the U.S., to trigger a General Assembly vote whenever a permanent member casts a veto. Almost ironically as he looked around at the ruins Russia had wrought of the U.N. Charter and the post-World War II settlement, Moscow’s representative claimed that “the division of powers between the Assembly and the Council has allowed the United Nations to function effectively for more than 75 years.” This “effectiveness” is indeed news to millions of people from Indochina to the Congo, the Balkans and the Middle East, whose lives have been afflicted by the “scourge of war,” unhindered by the U.N. Charter and the organization it set up to end it forever.

Consistently, as a frequent victim of the veto, the Palestine delegation was a cosponsor of the measure, leading to an Israeli delegate to protest that it was against the rules. But then the Israeli delegate compounded her obtusity, trying to reconcile the good vetoes that Washington used with the bad ones that Russia had wielded. “In some cases, the problem has been the text of the resolution before the Security Council, not the veto itself.”

Indeed, as she implies, the text of a resolution might well call Israeli actions into question and “in the case of a particular resolution in the Security Council that does not promote peace and security, the veto should be cast.”

From now on, supporters of Palestine can and should use every occasion of a General Assembly debate on a U.S. veto to relate American statements about Russian frightfulness in Ukraine with Israeli behavior in Gaza. Bombings of civilians, deaths of children, violation of boundaries, defiance of Geneva conventions, annexation of territories acquired by force: you would almost think that Putin had studied the Israeli blueprint, and as Adolph Hitler famously concluded over the Ottomans’ Armenian massacres, “they got away with it.”

It is a reciprocal learning process as the barbaric Israeli assassination of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh demonstrates. Who knows though, maybe the White House foreign policy team might also learn from the self-serving expediency and manifest ambivalence of Israel and the Gulf states to U.S. resolutions on Russia and let them know they cannot expect automatic diplomatic and military support.

And maybe the U.S. can once again realize that international law is not something you can turn on and off when Israel is involved: that you cannot preach effectively against annexations in Ukraine, while condoning land grabs in the Golan, West Bank and Western Sahara. ■

Sanctions! not BDS.

  https://www.palestinechronicle.com/ian-williams-deterioration-of-intl-human-rights-mechanisms-blamed-on-us-defense-of-israel-video/

Ratcheting up the clicks at the moment. Well done Omar and PDD!

Albright's State Deportment

 Accessed 18 April 1999

Albright's State Deportment/ IAN WILLIAMS

[A Review of] SEASONS OF HER LIFE:

A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright.

By Ann Blackman.

Scribner's. 398 pp. $27.

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic does not agree to peace terms. Just as over Bosnia, she may even believe what she says. Unfortunately, the Serb leader is much better informed. He knows that whatever the public differences, Belgrade and Washington are united in wanting to avoid NATO airstrikes (even if they come to pass). Albright's grandstanding is a necessary part of the charade in which the United States acts scary and the Serbs act scared.

 With her ability to be stridently parochial, and insular as well, in six different languages, Madeleine Albright has been the perfect Secretary of State for this Administration. Never one to let substance interfere with a good soundbite, she has reinvented herself whenever it has been advantageous to her ambitions.

 But does she really merit a biography on the scale of Seasons of Her Life? As Ann Blackman frames the problem, "What makes her, among all the other brilliant men and women in America, stand out?" Almost inadvertently, emerging from Blackman's hard work is a portrait of Albright that shows she would be outstanding mainly by dint of her mediocrity in any such gathering (thus well meriting the nickname Madeleine Halfbright, which State Department staff members gave her after her appointment as US ambassador to the UN).

 However, she would also stand out for her burning ambition--and for her intensive cultivation of social and political connections of the kind available to someone of substantial wealth. (Madame Secretary benefited from a generous divorce settlement after what she has described as a "Cinderella marriage" to a millionaire.) Blackman actually writes that "Albright's greatest appeal is that she is just like us, only wealthier"! This has perhaps unwitting overtones of Hemingway's putdown of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark about the rich--"They are different from you and me": "Yes, they have more money." But it really sums up the secret of Albright's success more aptly than any neofeminist reading of progress from the log cabin of Kinder, Küche, Kirche to political glory.

 In becoming the first woman to head the State Department, Albright achieved cult status in some superficially minded quarters. People Blackman terms the golden girls--Democrats like Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Kennelly and Anne Wexler--spoke out prominently in her favor, for example. But many of us who followed the careers of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi need convincing that the absence of cojones in itself guarantees wisdom, virtue or empathetic statesmanship. Even so, those redoubtable women, political warts and all, were elected despite their sex. Blackman's account makes it clear that Albright was appointed to public office by a symbol-sensitive White House because she was a woman. "Frankly, [President Clinton] wanted another woman in the cabinet," Blackman quotes a wisely anonymous but assumedly knowledgeable source as saying. In fact, cojones did help Albright directly, since her use of the word at the United Nations over Castro's downing of a flight of Cuban exiles helped lock her in the media eye as a staunch anticommunist--and an electoral asset for the President in Florida.

 Blackman's bibliography cites Albright's PhD dissertation, her MA submission for Columbia, one from Wellesley and a mere quartet of memorable public speeches, significant for their carefully crafted soundbites rather than their insights. Certainly no male so thinly qualified would have even been on the short list to head State--nor would a better-qualified woman lacking Albright's social connections. Among her predecessors, Warren Christopher may not have played to the gallery, but he had a long record of public service and had been Deputy Secretary of State prior to his Cabinet appointment. Cyrus Vance had been Deputy Secretary of State as well (and LBJ's emissary to North Vietnam) before he was elevated.

 Blackman's journalistic integrity rescues this book from the hagiographic gushing that it occasionally approaches. However, that creates a constant dissonance between biographical intent and delivery of the content. For example, she asserts that Albright has made sure that "women's rights are a central priority of US foreign policy" but then goes on to report that there has been no great leap forward in the number of female ambassadors on her watch. She quotes a close friend of Albright as saying, "Gender didn't hit her in any real way until she got to the United Nations. Feminism wasn't an important cause for her until recently."

 Even at that, it appears mainly to be a stepping stone. For example, Blackman reports that while Albright was nominally in charge of the US delegation to the International Women's Conference in Beijing, she disdained actual attendance, except insofar as she could share Hillary Clinton's plane for the one-day fly-in visit. Significantly, the book is as silent as Albright was herself about the sexually adventurous Clinton's sacking of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders (another, more neglected female first) for her statement at the UN that masturbation did not carry a risk of AIDS. In a more political vein, Albright's first move on arrival at the UN was to push out April Glaspie, the former chargé d'affaires in Iraq who carried the can for the Bush Administration in its confused signals to Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War. Glaspie had been serving her penance at the US Mission to the UN. In short, sisterhood may have been a force in getting

Albright appointed, but it is not a concept she has put into practice much herself.

 Blackman also records that her globetrotting protagonist was not going to attend the Copenhagen UN Social Summit at all, considering the war against global poverty too soft a subject for her consideration. Until, that is, Al Gore announced he was going, whereupon Albright, then UN ambassador, decided to hitch a lift with him. As Blackman says, she "understood that if she were to have any chance at higher office, she would need to spend time with people who could influence the decision." Brown-nosing becomes an art form in these pages, which occasionally read like Diary of a Nobody in the third person, as they record Albright's delight at getting this or that invitation, or mortification at being left off this or that power list.

 Despite the log-cabin-to-State-Department nonsense that she and her spinmeisters have woven, it is clear that Albright came from a relatively affluent and privileged background. No amount of spin can transform a privileged, upper-middle-class upbringing, with governesses and Swiss private schools, into a life of deprivation.

 Few people would regard being the daughter of a college professor and having to take a scholarship to Wellesley as swimming against the social stream. After marrying into money, Albright used her wealth to consolidate her position as a Georgetown hostess whose rabidly hawkish cold war sentiments, seemingly picked up through hero worship of her Czech émigré father, could always find a popular echo among Democratic movers and shakers. (Albright was an outsider of her own creation, since she had set herself on being rich, WASP and Wellesleyan and remade herself in this image, renouncing Catholicism for a comfortable Episcopalianism.)

 At least we are spared any hint of a radical past. Albright, it seems, was a proto-neocon from the beginning. During the sixties, when, Blackman stereotypically tells us, "antiwar radicals who grew their hair long and smoked pot" and "black-power advocates sporting 'Afros'" besieged college presidents, Albright found the demonstrations at Columbia "a pain in the neck." Albright, we deduce, neither wore an Afro nor smoked the demon weed; instead, she struggled with her postgraduate work and wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave the children at home with the housekeeper.

 Interestingly, and once again reflecting the dissonance between the biographer's task and this volume's contents, the body of Blackman's text takes seriously Albright's amazing amnesia about her Jewish ancestry and the price her grandparents paid for their ethnicity. Blackman does record in her introduction that she found "very few people who believe [Albright] was truly ignorant of her family heritage." As Blackman herself says, it "stretched the imagination." Within months of her appointment as Secretary of State, in other words, Albright was revealed to be someone who was either suffering premature Alzheimer's or who was pathologically covering up knowledge of her family history. On the face of it, neither is an optimal characteristic for running the foreign policy of the world's only superpower. Blackman fails to consider what the effect of these revelations would have been if they had surfaced before her appointment: Discussions made public at the time reveal that Albright might have found herself scoring more negative points for her Jewishness than positive points for her womanhood at a bean-counting White House.

 There is much in this book with the ring of truth--but what rings out loudest is the sound of silence when it comes to examining the record of Albright's public life as opposed to her personal history. Blackman disclaims any attempt to analyze her subject's approach to US foreign policy in favor of following "the path Albright walked to shatter the glass ceiling." Would it be conceivable for a biographer of Henry Kissinger to write about his struggle with his Austrian-Jewish origins in an administration that was frequently tinged with anti-Semitism--and not mention Vietnam or Cambodia?

 Yet in Seasons of Her Life, Blackman gives almost as much prominence to Albright's presidency of the trustees of the Beauvoir Elementary School in Washington, DC--an affluent private establishment not much patronized by the majority population of the District--as she does to her career at the UN. In one way this is reasonable, since it was the nearest thing to public office Albright held before becoming ambassador to the UN in 1993.

 There is much talk of facials, hairdos, dating and dresses, but not one single mention of Rwanda. In fact, in 1994 Albright fought single-handedly in the Security Council to stop any UN reinforcements whatsoever from going to Kigali while somewhere between half a million and a million Tutsis were being massacred. All agree that loyalty to Clinton has been one of her virtues. She was never more loyal than in this championing of Presidential Decision Directive 25, which ruled that the United States would veto any UN peacekeeping operation that did not directly benefit US interests. Her pride in her Czech origins is continually stated, but in this case it was ironically justified. "The crocodiles in the Kagera River and the vultures over Rwanda have never had it so good," Karel Kovanda, the Czech ambassador to the UN, reprimanded his colleagues on the Security Council (and by implication one in particular) in an attempt to get reinforcements for the tiny UN contingent in Kigali.

 In another example of diplomacy by soundbite and photo-op, Blackman reports that Albright went to Somalia to wear a flak-jacket with US troops for the cameras and that she decided Boutros Boutros-Ghali should be fired as Secretary General of the UN because of that organization's failure there. However, Blackman does not mention her heroine's role in pushing the UN to fight a vendetta with Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, which could be regarded as the cause of the debacle in which eighteen US Rangers were killed. Nor does she mention that the key incident in which the soldiers were killed was an American operation initiated and carried out without even informing, let alone consulting, UN forces on the ground.

 Blackman gives the dubious credit for sacking Boutros-Ghali to Albright without really explaining why she did it. Perhaps closer examination would have led Blackman to examine the most likely hypothesis: that, Salome-like, Albright danced in front of Jesse Helms with Boutros-Ghali's head, in return for promises of easy confirmation as Secretary of State from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

 Blackman fails to explore what is, on the face of it, a highly unlikely yet continuing alliance between Albright and Helms. In fact, they share an intensely parochial and reactionary view of the world. Perhaps the most germane comment is the cable home from former British Ambassador Sir John Weston, who, in best "Yes, Minister" style, alerted the Foreign Office to the failings of the new Secretary of State. "She is not always good at accepting the need to apply to the United States the same standards and expectations she requires of others.... There is a mildly irritating tendency to create a fixed position and then to look around for others to save her from the detailed consequences of it.... Her reaction to being exposed or brought under pressure from sudden turns of events are sometimes tetchy, verging on the panicky."

 It is perhaps significant that Weston has retired from the Foreign Service. Most of the other diplomats who were privately so dismissive of her joined the fawning chorus of congratulations once she became Secretary of State. The same process has been obvious in the media, where her career has been written up as if she were some combination of Metternich and Mother Teresa.

 In fact, most of the press who covered Albright at the UN had as little time for her as she had for them. Her spinman would go straight to Washington to get the pliable coverage he wanted, bypassing the New York staff. From the time of her arrival at the UN, it was obvious where her ambitions lay, and her media effort was directed solely at the State Department. However, she had apparently been cautioned that it would not do to look too eager, so everyone was supposed to conspire in pretending that it was not so.

 I must confess an interest here. Not long after Albright took over, her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, bell, book and candled me from the US Mission in 1994 for writing a profile of Albright in the New York Observer that referred to her "barely concealed ambitions...to become Secretary of State." Rubin complained that I had not recorded his denial of any such ambition; she and her staff have a strong view of the proper role of journalists: as stenographers whose task is to write down every word.

 When the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs revealed his findings about Albright's family being massacred during World War II, Blackman records that Albright's response was to call Post publisher Katharine Graham, who wisely realized that it was too late to do anything about the story. Rubin's response was to spoil Dobbs's scoop by leaking his results to other outlets who could assure a more sympathetic, if not sycophantic, stance. Later, one press occasion in Belgrade was canceled simply because Dobbs was the pool reporter.

 Blackman says she asked Albright about the prevailing State Department doctrine that if someone writes something 99 percent positive and 1 percent negative about her, she will focus on the 1 percent. The champion of free speech and the American way of life told her chillingly, "So eliminate the 1 percent." It is to Blackman's credit that she has significantly exceeded the single percent. While most of her editorializations are in the traditional inside-the-Beltway mode of never attacking a possible source and the impressive negative percentage is always ascribed to others, I'd be surprised if Blackman ever got another exclusive interview. In Washington, access is given to stenographers, not investigators.

 Blackman's integrity and resourcefulness show through the pink cotton wool padding. I only wish she had adopted the persona of the little girl revealing the insubstantiality of Empress Albright's new clothes and dug a little deeper. She could have explained just why Albright is the perfect embodiment of this Administration's content-free foreign policy, in which one deranged Senator from North Carolina or a campaign donation from a banana magnate has more weight than all of America's allies put together, let alone the rest of the world.

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Ian Williams, The Nation's UN correspondent, has reported extensively on Madeleine Albright.

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Come Back Haile Selasse, all is forgotten.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVNPFo8tZvw

If Caracas why not Teheran?

If Caracas, why not Teheran? Briefing with Trita Parsi Friday, March 18th, 2 p.m. EDT on Zoom Faced with war in Ukraine, oil shortages, Gulf, Saudi and Israeli reticence to support the US diplomatically and economically, Western policy towards Teheran is shifting, even as Moscow tries to use the JCPOA for leverage.  Trita Parsi EVP of the Quincy Institute tries to parse the shifts in policy and see where it fits in the wider conflicts.   REGISTER Trita Parsi is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. In 2021, he was named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 50 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC, and preeminent public intellectual Noam Chomsky calls Parsi "one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran."

The UNsteps back from the plate.

 https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/03/03/what-russias-defeat-at-the-un-really-means/

Stalin's Ghosts

 https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TtdORXrzToeHS8pAbbZYzQ

My interview with Terry Melia

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNpWUt0pBow

Foreign Press Briefings

 I've been remiss in keeping up to date. I promise to do better. In the meantime, here is a compendium of recent FPA briefings

https://www.youtube.com/c/foreignpressassociationusa

 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2021, pp. 23-25

United Nations Report

By Ian Williams

ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST, one can see why fainter hearts despair of the United Nations while other more urbane observers make allowances for its inherent weaknesses. However, increasingly the failure to do anything about its weaknesses pushes every observer into despair. Ten or fifteen years ago, these Washington Report U.N. columns lamented the stranglehold of the U.S. over the organization and the perennial logjam in the Security Council as the U.S. and Russia vetoed and counter-vetoed essential measures. For many observers, the answer was to expand the Security Council and make it “more representative.”

Now, in a way, the reformers have won. There is a jackal pack of hangers on, albeit not formally enrolled in the Council, with an indirect paw on the steering wheel—and more concerningly, a foot on the brake. Unsurprisingly this has not made for a more efficient or effective United Nations.

We saw this most distressingly when the U.N. Human Rights Council members succumbed to some combination of browbeating and bribery from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in October to thwart the continuation of an U.N. investigation into human rights violations in Yemen.

This point needs belaboring. On anyone’s objective reckoning, despite fierce competition, Yemen is one of the most distressful countries in the world, where the four horsepersons of Apocalypse have been staging their own lethal rodeo. There can be no doubt that there are human rights violations there, which impelled the U.N. Human Rights Council to order an investigation. There is little doubt that both sides (in fact all three sides; it’s complicated) are in some measure guilty. But, for example, only one side, the Saudis and Emiratis, are bombing civilians and, incidentally, a UNESCO world heritage site in Sana’a.

Even their Western allies, such as Britain, who have been supplying and training Abrahamic allies’ murderous forces, could not provide excuses for scuppering the investigation. But the Saudis, with an extra layer of diplomatic armor from their part in the accords with Israel, do not have to worry about domestic courts, international law and human rights lobbies. Shamefully, they have just succeeded in cancelling the probe.

As Human Rights Watch had said, “Member states bowing to pressure to end the mandate when it is still urgently needed would be a stain on the credibility of the Council and a slap in the face to victims.” As the dark joke in the U.N. has it, if the vote were on a show of hands, the wrists of those who voted “no” would probably be sporting Gold Rolexes.

Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Somalia, Venezuela, Indonesia, Libya, the Philippines, Russia, Sudan and, shamefully, India and Pakistan acting in uncommon harmony all voted “no” on continuing the probe, while Nepal, Japan, Namibia and others failed to have the courage of their lack of principles and abstained. Even more pusillanimous, Ukraine just disappeared for the vote!

We are accustomed to Palestine votes evoking hypocrisy at the highest level, as delegations weigh U.S. and Israeli pressure against the principles of self-determination and humanitarian law to which they pay lip service. In the case of Yemen, one can only guess what combination of outright bribes and fear of financial retaliation from the Saudis led to the votes, along with the intriguing spectacle of the heirs of the Warsaw Pact —Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia—who have between them demonstrated strong international solidarity with their bloc of mutual support for authoritarian impunity.

The real question is what these countries are doing on the Council at all. They do have a shared concern for human rights in that they all violate them at home, and have now moved to international concern—as in the “you watch my back and I’ll watch yours” variety.

It demonstrates that the system for choosing Human Rights Council members has broken down. The Council took its shape in almost a by-gone era of concern for human rights. The Clinton administration had supported the U.N. (up to a point) of course and actively lobbied for human rights—when it suited. The reforms called for every country’s record to be periodically reviewed, which reduced the ability of supportive blocs to head off scrutiny. Human rights supporters could also count on some support from delegations like South Africa to try to secure actual elections that would take into consideration the behavior of the candidates in the regional blocs.

They were somewhat successful for a while—even knocking the U.S. off the Council. But the U.S. soon gave up the fight while diehard support for Israel, Guantanamo and similar issues tarnished Washington’s shining armor as a champion of human rights. The “elections” for the seats have become a tragi-farce in which the regional blocs, even the West Europeans, make sure that there are only nominations for the number of seats available. So, there are no contested elections and a primary qualification for nomination appears to be that the candidate country has a dubious human rights record that it wants to hide.

All members vote for all the seats, but candidates must come from the regional blocs they represent. In the beginning, there was effective pressure to ensure competitive elections, for which candidates had to prove their suitability. Then the insidious U.N. pressure for consensus and “Buggins’ Turn” principles allied with arm twisting and garotting by the Saudi purse-strings took over and the number of candidates was whittled down to the number of vacancies.

Even the last bastion, the Western European seats, succumbed ironically to ensure that the perennially vulnerable U.S. was seated since even reforming members saw little value in the Council if the U.S. were not in it. Certainly the Trump administration did nothing to encourage competitive elections for a Council. But other members are culpable as well.

Accordingly, October’s Human Rights Council elections saw Cameroon, Eritrea, Gambia, Benin and Somalia for the African group; Qatar, UAE, Kazakhstan, India and Malaysia for the Asian group; Argentina, Paraguay and Honduras for the Latin America and the Caribbean group; Luxembourg, Finland and the United States for the Western group; and Lithuania and Montenegro for the Eastern Europe group take their seats.

Few of them are paragons of human rights. And while we can welcome the U.S.’ resumption of participation, let us just say that police impunity for murders and Guantanamo are hardly recommendations. The top vote was 189 for Benin, and much deserved bottom vote of 144 went to Eritrea—as much for its habit of quarreling with neighbors as for its human rights record, I suspect. The U.S. came in next to bottom with 168 votes. But pathetically few states heeded Human Rights Watch’s call to refrain from voting for human rights violators. Back to the drawing board for the Human Rights Council, but who has the political and moral authority to force changes? There is no activist secretary general like Kofi Annan to push a reform agenda and the U.S.’ moral authority is deep in the Dead Sea with its Israeli protégé.

U.N. Watch is a “nonprofit organization dedicated to holding the United Nations accountable to its founding principles.” After it was pointed out (in here and other places) that its only concerns seemed to be countering criticism of Israel, it has recently weighed in on other issues where the U.N. has failed human rights, in an effort to restore credibility. However, it cannot escape its monomania. In 2019, it took time to inveigh (correctly) against the Saudi accession to the Council. I took the occasion of this year’s Saudi triumph in suppressing the investigation about Yemen to scour their website for any mention of this latest assault on liberty and reason.

There is nothing there, which could lead one to suppose that the Kingdom is bathed in the blood of the lamb, cleansed of all sin by the Abrahamic Accords. One would look hard at U.N. Watch to see any criticism of Morocco, whether at home or in the Occupied Western Sahara. It is plain to see that standing by Israel gives a “get out of criticism free card” for any country.

With amusing irony, U.N. Watch also tells home truths about the Palestinian Authority, what one might call the authoritarian wing of the national movement, without mentioning that much of that abuse of power is aimed at more vociferous Palestinian resistance to Israel, which is of course vying to see how much of the Palestinian opposition it can lock up.

In the early years of the Council, Kofi Annan and his team actively lobbied delegations to ensure some degree of competition, but as so often on human rights issues, particularly where the Saudis are concerned, there is a deafening silence from the U.N. Secretariat. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is honored, far more often in the breach, than the observance.

And that brings us to another core principle of the post-war United Nations, “The inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force,” or the abandonment of the old principle of the right of conquest. It is, of course, no accident that this principle was only ratified after World War II had rewritten many boundaries by force! But it is what denies Israel legal title to the West Bank and the Golan Heights—and which denied Saddam Hussain title to Kuwait.

On Israel’s behalf, the U.S. still tests this principle to destruction. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently reasserted Israeli claims to the Golan Heights, and U.S. responses did not rebut him, but simply mentioned the current incapacity of Damascus. In the West Bank, the U.S. prevaricates on whether or not the territories are occupied or disputed. And to show the global effects, the Biden administration has yet to walk back former President Trump’s acquiescence in the Moroccan landgrab. Showing more adherence to the rule of law, the European Courts over-ruled the EU bureaucrats who allowed Morocco to pocket the proceeds of Western Sahara’s fisheries.

On the other hand, in annexers’ solidarity, Israel proudly announced the sale of drones to Morocco, clearly intended for use against Polisario.

The U.N. has many fine features and noble aspirations, but one does wonder when the politicians and the leaders of the organization will bother to activate them or, after decades of taming and training by kleptocrats and genocides, even whether they can be activated.

---

U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from ­Middle East Books and More).

Ban Ki Moon at the FPA

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Y3xfcok3k

Ban KiMoon talks to Ian Williams at the FPA about his new book.