A Double Standard to Say the Least

Look What Putin Gets to Say

*Note to readers: Deadlines have their uses, but I am finding that a fixed schedule for Paul Street Reports is more stress than I want. At the same time, I commonly work off the news/current events in time-sensitive ways that often militate against waiting for the official publication times. I am going to run for a bit with “it goes up when it goes up” and see how that feels.

Vladimir Putin is a blood-soaked butcher who is a hero of far-right politicos across the world, including the United States, for some very good reasons.  His oligarchic and oppressive, viciously anti-feminist and anti-LGBT police state regime carries a strong whiff of fascism. His invasion of Ukraine is a criminal act that has included numerous unconscionable attacks on civilian noncombatants.

Still, Putin is right to say that his invasion was provoked by the imperialist United States-led West and he is now doubly correct to accuse Western leaders of abject hypocrisy when they decry his crimes in Ukraine.  His Western accusers have for the last seven weeks stood shoulder to shoulder with the US-funded/US-equipped/US-protected Ziofascist state of Israel as it has committed offenses in Gaza that dwarf Russia’s transgressions in Ukraine.  

“In his first address to officials from the Group of 20 leading economies since his invasion of Ukraine,” The New York Times reported last week, “President Vladimir V. Putin…rebuffed criticism that the war’s aggression was ‘shocking’ and accused Western nations of a double standard because of their response to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.”

“US-Made 2000-Pound Bombs…in a Small Area….[Like] the Second World War”

If anything, “double standard” (the Times’ phrase) understates matters.

“The conflict between Israel and Hamas” is a ridiculous way for the Times to describe the one-sided war that US-sponsored Israel has waged on the people of Gaza in the wake of the Hamas-led terror attacks that took place last October 7. What the mainstream Western media calls “the Israel-Hamas War” is more accurately understood as the genocidal US-Israel crucifixion and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The killing of white Ukrainians has elicited endless, strident moral condemnation in European capitals and the US ever since the Russian invasion in February of 2022. By telling contrast, Israel’s slaughter, mass terrorization, and displacement of brown-skinned Palestinian Gazans has been defended by the political ruling classes of Europe and America. The top western imperialist himself, US president Joe Biden – rightly nicknamed named “Genocide  Joe” by the global Palestinian  solidarity movement – has flown to Tel Aviv to personally embrace Israel’s gnocidal fascist president Bibi Netanyahu as he and his generals – one of whom has openly described Palestinians as “human animals” – have killed Palestinians civilians at a record pace for this century.   

Yes, at a record pace for this century. As the Times reported yesterday:  

“Even a conservative assessment of the reported Gaza casualty figures shows that the rate of death during Israel’s assault has few precedents in this century, experts say. Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria. But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different…experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century. People are being killed in Gaza more quickly…than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups….conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.

It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself. Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.

‘It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,’ said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may ‘have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.’ In fighting during this century, by contrast, U.S. military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb — a 500-pound weapon — was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.”

More Women and Children Killed in Gaza in the Last Seven Weeks Than in Ukraine Over the Last Two Years

Yes, 2000-pound bombs dropped in dense urban areas, reminding war casualty experts of the mass civilian destruction conducted in Vietnam and World War II.  Consider also:

• Gazans have had to build mass graves, reminiscent of mass slaughters conducted by the Nazi Third Reich in Eastern Europe early in World War II.

• More women and children slaughtered have been slaughtered by Israel in Gaza in the last month and a half than all the women and children killed in Ukraine in the last two years, the Times reports.

• More children have been killed in Gaza by Israel in the last month and a half than all the children killed in all the world's conflict zones in the last year, the Times adds.

• The new Trail of Tears: A nuclear military power (Israel) funded, equipped, and protected by the world's top imperialist aggressor state (the USA) has sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian human beings fleeing from their homes on foot and donkey cart across rubble-filled streets, dodging bullets and bombs with corpses all around.

  “A Perilous Journey”

For those who survived the initial Ziofascist bombardments, the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza has created a contemporary Trail of Tears: 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forcibly displaced.  The following report is from the Times yesterday – a harrowing account of the deranged collective punishment (highly illegal under international law) Israel has been conducting in the wake of October 7:

“They walked for hours, raising their hands when they encountered Israeli troops with guns trained on them to display their I.D. cards — or wave white rags. All around them was the sound of gunfire and the incessant buzzing of drones. Bodies littered rubble-filled streets…For the tens of thousands of Gazans who have fled the northern part of the enclave where the heaviest fighting has been taking place, evacuating to the south has been a perilous journey…

Those lucky enough or with means fled early, but some Gazans who spoke to the Times said they could not leave earlier because they do not have relatives or anyone they know in the south, cannot leave older family members behind or don’t have the resources. Instead, many sheltered in increasingly dangerous and desperate conditions at schools or hospitals in the north. But at some point, they made the difficult decision to leave.

Even that decision was fraught. In the weeks leading up to the cease-fire, Israel has also bombed the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and some Gazans feel uprooting themselves further with no guarantee of shelter in the south is not worth it.

The United Nations says 1.7 million of the 2.3 million residents in the Hamas-controlled enclave have been displaced.

The Gazans who spoke to The Times said they felt shame, loss of dignity and anger at finding themselves struggling for their lives in the latest war between Israel and Hamas. The journey — which takes Gazans hours depending on where in the north they are leaving from — is usually done on foot or on a donkey cart.

Aya Habboub, 23, remained in northern Gaza earlier this month, heavily pregnant with her third child. She gave birth in a hospital under intense bombardment but was forced to evacuate when the baby, whom she named Tia, was just four days old…Barely able to walk, Ms. Habboub tried to rest by the side of the road, but her husband urged her to keep going. Israeli soldiers, she said, stopped her mother-in-law and ordered the woman to stand for half an hour and raise her hands.

‘Then they were firing,’ Ms. Habboub said, ‘and we started running.’ Ms. Habboub was speaking in a hospital in Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza, where many are sheltering. In her lap, Tia, cocooned in a white cloth, was sleeping peacefully. ‘I dropped my baby,’ she said. ‘I was crying and screaming.’

Several Gazans whom The Times spoke to described similar scenes of soldiers firing in the general vicinity of those fleeing.”

There’s nothing truly hidden about the carnage being inflicted. You can read about a good part of it in the imperialist United States’ leading paper of national record.

What a despicable thing for US Americans and Europeans to defend.