Under any legal standard, one will be charged as a criminal in case of assisting others anyhow in their crimes especially when it comes to war crimes which are despised as the cruelest form of human behavior, Antiwar writes in an article.
A quick glance at the indiscriminate murder of civilians in the Gaza Strip obviously unveils the fact that Israel is openly committing war crimes in the coastal enclave.
The two most heinous war crimes Israel is committing – as defined by the Geneva Convention – are the concepts of “collective punishment” and “necessity and proportionality.”
Under collective punishment, a warring party cannot respond to an attack by waging war on the attacker’s community, as is clearly happening in Gaza. The clearest proof that collective punishment is being used is that a 1,000 Gaza homes have been destroyed and the majority of the casualties are civilians.
Under “necessity and proportionality” a warring party must only use the amount of force necessary to defeat the opponent; disproportional force is a crime. So, for example, if Hamas fires wimpy rockets that kill virtually no Israelis, then it is “disproportionate” for Israel to rain massive bombs, missiles, and artillery to reduce large sections of Gaza to rubble.
Even Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called the Israel attack a “deliberately disproportionate form of collective punishment.”
It is also a specific war crime to deliberately attack civilians, and especially to attack facilities treating the wounded. But Israel has attacked al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza four times.
Even the pro-western Human Rights Watch has denounced Israel for committing war crimes.
Obama’s aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes is also closed to debate, since his administration stands guilty from the very beginning of the conflict by shielding Israel from international political pressure, hiding its war crimes by deliberate misrepresenting what is happening, and giving political space for the war to continue by not intervening directly.
It was a blatantly laughable lie when Obama said that his government was “using all means” to achieve a ceasefire early in the conflict.
The US influence over Israel is tremendous, and Obama could have ended the conflict in the first hour by simply declaring, “If Israel does not stop its attack on Gaza, the US will refuse further military and financial assistance and sever all diplomatic and political ties.” That could put an immediate end to the war.
Instead of taking this action, or any action for that matter, Obama sat on the sidelines. In fact, Obama deliberately waited until the end of the second week of the war to even send his Secretary of State, John Kerry, to broker a ceasefire deal. Of course, Obama could have come himself.
Obama further assisted in Israeli war crimes by repeatedly justifying Israel’s right to commit them, deceitfully justifying all Israeli atrocities under the big umbrella of “self-defense.”
The US president did not even hesitate to signal green light to Tel Aviv in its ground offensive on Gaza.
Even in his Middle East peace mission Secretary of State John Kerry was still making excuses for Israeli’s war crimes: “Kerry also blamed the latest wave of violence on what he called Israel’s “legitimate” efforts to pursue and punish those who last month kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers whose bodies were found in the West Bank.”
Again, bombing a whole city because three Israeli teens were killed is disproportional collective punishment – war crimes.
There is also no evidence that Hamas is responsible for the death of three Israeli teens, which it has denied since the beginning.
The colossally disproportionate aspect of the war has been continually smoothed over by the Obama administration, which consistently lumps Palestinian and Israeli civilian deaths evenly together, as if they were happening with equal frequency. But in reality over 1000 Palestinians that have been killed and more than 6000 wounded are mostly civilians, while the few dozen Israeli’s who’ve died have been mostly soldiers.
Most of the world believes Israel’s actions are outrageous, an opinion not allowed to be expressed at the United Nations, thanks again to the Obama administration, which used its influence over the UN Security Council to limit its statement to “serious concern” about civilian casualties on “both sides”.
The Obama administration has also assisted Israeli War Crimes by continually blaming the elected government of Hamas for not agreeing to the Egyptian brokered ceasefire agreement.
Lastly, the Obama administration has consistently lied about the origins of this bloodbath. The three dead Israeli teens were not the cause of this conflict, but the pretext, which the Israeli government consciously exploited to promote war among the Israeli population.
The real cause of the war was the recent alliance between the Palestinian Authority – which governs the West Bank – and Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip. This alliance gave the Palestinians their strongest hand in bargaining with Israel in perhaps decades, which was enough to spark a new round of massacres from the Israeli government in an effort to re-balance the bargaining table.
This ongoing bloody dynamic continues in large part because the US government allows it.
Like the majority of people around the globe who are decrying Israeli war crimes, the US citizens are expected to denounce the Obama administration’s criminal actions in assisting Israeli war crimes.
NDG/SHI