"disgust" and "genocide" words with lopsided agendas

In the dark of night, on 14 November, the United Nations Security Council met to discuss Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. As elections in Israel are on the horizon, the Israeli Defense Force conducted an extra-judicial assassination of Hamas’ Ahmad Jabari, who only hours beforehand had received a draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel (according to Nir Hasson at Haaretz). Jabari’s assassination was followed by a barrage by Israeli aircraft and warships. A few rockets were fired from Gaza, but these have had a negligible impact. The war on Gaza is not between two armed forces, even matched, each flying the flag of a country; it is a war between a major military power and a people that it has occupied, whose means of warfare used to be the suicide bomber and has now devolved to the erratic rockets (propelled by sugar and potassium nitrate, a fertilizer, and made deadly by TNT and urea nitrate, another fertilizer). Most of the rockets fired over the past two days have been intercepted by Israel’s sophisticated Iron Dome system. No such luck for the Palestinians, who have faced US-designed F16 jetfighters and Apache helicopters and have no defensive systems.

Morocco and Egypt, on behalf of the stateless Palestinians, hastened to the UN Security Council, wanting to stop the violence and condemn Israel for its disproportionate use of force. The Council’s President, India’s Hardeep Singh Puri said, “All the statements that I heard resonated with one message – that the violence has to stop. There has to be de-escalation.”

The United States defended Israel. Susan Rice put the onus on Hamas. “There is no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel,” she said. “Israel, like any nation, has the right to defend itself against such vicious attacks.” The sentences sting with contradictions. Israel is not just a nation in this conflict, but an occupying power, who has violated a string of UN resolutions and the Geneva Convention in its treatment of the people it has occupied since 1967. Furthermore, while the United States has listed Hamas as a terrorist organization, this same political party also won relatively free and fair elections in Gaza in 2006 (at which point the Hamas leadership sent US President George W. Bush an unanswered letter with the proposal that they would accept Israel on the 1967 borders). 

Selective Outrage

The moralism of Rice and Power does not extend to the victims of Atlantic imperialism. Genocides are only those when the perpetrators are not among the Atlantic powers. The long finger is pointed at the Eastern Europeans and the Africans – never at the United States government or NATO and never Israel. Thousands certainly died in Kosovo, but hundreds of thousands died in Iraq and East Timor – two states where the US was either the perpetrator or the benefactor. The word “genocide” has been sequestered to US imperial ends, with Rice and Power disgusted with the violence of others but not of themselves.

There is no disgust at the consistent egging on by the US of the Pakistani military to act against its own people, the most egregious being the campaign in the Swat Valley where hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives and were rendered displaced. An Amnesty International briefing pointedly noted, “The Pakistani government’s response to the rise of insurgents in the NWFP’s Malakand Division (mainly in the Lower Dir, Buner, and Swat valley) and in the Tribal Areas fluctuates between launching often indiscriminate and disproportionate military operations that harm mainly civilians and abandoning Pakistani citizens to abusive militant groups. Security forces deployed in government operations often fail to differentiate between civilians and militants and use disproportionate force, causing civilian deaths and injuries and destroying civilian property. Such disregard for civilian life and civilian infrastructure, such as homes and schools, is common throughout the region.” It is not just the Pakistani government that came in for criticism by Amnesty, but its “international backers – notably the United States,” who have said that the aim is not to protect civilians but to pursue “military and counterterrorism objectives, with often fatal consequences for civilians.”

There was no disgust either in the US policy in Central Africa. While a Senator, Obama sponsored a bill (PL 109-456) that called on the US government to withhold aid to neighboring countries that destabilize Congo (the co-sponsor was Hillary Clinton). US allies Rwanda and Uganda are serial destabilizers. When Rice was Assistant Secretary for African Affairs in the Clinton administration, she elaborated the idea of African Renaissance leaders, with two in particular to be celebrated – Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda. Both of them have invaded Congo twice (1996 and 1998) with US backing. The International Court of Justice has found Uganda responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Congo, and the Spanish Courts have issued arrest warrants for forty top Rwandan officials for similar crimes. The US has remained tight-lipped, despite the millions dead.

Rice was not disgusted. Her disgust is not moral. It is calibrated to the interests of US foreign policy. No wonder Obama wants her as his Secretary of State. She would articulate perfectly an imperialist foreign policy in the language of human rights and outrage. 

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-agonies-of-susan-rice-gaza-and-the-negroponte-doctrine-by-vijay-prashad