Western Hypocrisy regarding Ruins in Ramadi as against Ruins in Gaza

The hypocrisy of Western governments is and has been blatant and sometimes gross. Their moralizing scolding of Israel belongs to their Judeophobic and self-righteous self-regard. Evelyn Gordon exposes just how deep and how offensive this hypocrisy is.

Ramadi, Gaza, and Western Hypocrisy

EVELYN GORDON / JAN. 13, 2016

Image by © STR/epa/Corbis.

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During the Hamas-Israel war of 2014, both Obama Administration officials and their European counterparts repeatedly accused Israel of excessive force over the “massive” destruction of civilian property in Gaza. But if those officials retain even a shred of intellectual integrity, the recent devastation of Ramadi during a joint Western/Iraqi effort to retake the city leaves them only two options: either hand themselves over to the International Criminal Court as suspected war criminals, or publicly apologize to Israel for all the slurs they hurled at it over far less extensive damage.

As the New York Times reported last week, the successful recapture of Ramadi from the Islamic State left the city “in ruins.” Reporter Ben Hubbard described one neighborhood as “a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood.” The city has no electricity or running water, and “Many streets had been erased or remained covered in rubble or blocked by trenches used in the fighting.” When Hubbard asked an Iraqi officer how residents would return to their homes, the officer replied, “Homes? There are no homes.”

Indeed, a different Iraqi officer told the Associated Press “that more than half of the city’s buildings have been destroyed, including government offices, markets, and houses.”

This is devastation orders of magnitude greater than what Gaza suffered. According to UN figures, 9,465 homes in Gaza were completely destroyed and another 9,644 badly damaged, out of a total of roughly 319,000 (the latter figure is my own calculation based on  official Palestinian statistics: Dividing Gaza’s total population of 1.82 million by its average household size of 5.7 people gives you 319,000 households). Thus even according to the UN – which traditionally exaggeratesPalestinian casualties and damage – only about 6 percent of Gaza’s homes were destroyed or badly damaged. That’s a far cry from “more than half of the city” in Ramadi.

But the reasons for the destruction, in both places, are no less significant than its scope. One, as Hubbard noted, is the inherent difficulty “of dislodging a group that stitches itself into the urban fabric of communities it seizes by occupying homes, digging tunnels, and laying extensive explosives.” In Ramadi, he reported, Islamic State built tunnels under the streets and planted explosives in roads and buildings. Indeed, “Entire areas are considered no-go zones because they have yet to be searched for booby traps left by the jihadists.”

These are the same tactics Hamas used in Gaza: Tunnels, booby traps, and weapons stockpiles were placed in and under civilian buildings on a massive scale. On July 30, 2014, for instance, three Israeli soldiers were killed by “an explosion at a booby-trapped UNRWA health clinic that housed a tunnel entry shaft,” the Times of Israel reported. At the same press briefing where those deaths were announced, an Israeli officer said Hamas had thus far detonated more than 1,000 bombs, destroying “thousands of buildings” in Gaza. As an example, he cited a street the army searched the previous night in which 19 out of 28 buildings were booby-trapped.

But in Gaza, both the Obama administration and European officials blamed Israel for the ensuing destruction. In Ramadi, in contrast, both American and Iraqi officials quite sensibly “placed blame for the city’s destruction on the jihadists, who mined roads and buildings.”

The other factor in Ramadi’s devastation was airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition. As AP reported, these strikes “smashed large parts of the city into rubble.” Nor is that surprising: When a target area is extensively booby-trapped, even precision airstrikes often cause greater-than-expected damage, because the attacking force can’t know which buildings are wired with explosives, and hitting a wired building will set off massive secondary explosions. Yet airstrikes are unavoidable when fighting militants entrenched in a sea of tunnels and booby-trapped buildings, because using ground troops alone would result in unacceptably high losses for the attacking force.

Consequently, a Pentagon spokesman correctly blamed Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) for the damage to Ramadi: “One hundred percent of this is on ISIL because no one would be dropping any bombs if ISIL hadn’t gone in there,” Colonel Steven H. Warren told Hubbard.

Yet in Gaza, both the Obama Administration and European officials largely blamed the damage on Israel rather than Hamas, even though Israeli airstrikes were employed for the exact same reason, sometimes caused greater-than-expected damage for the exact same reason, and obviously wouldn’t have been launched at all had Hamas not attacked Israel to begin with. Indeed, Israel’s airstrikes were arguably far more justified than America’s were: Islamic State wasn’t firing missiles at America from Ramadi or digging attack tunnels into American territory from Ramadi. In contrast, Hamas had fired thousands of rockets at Israel from Gaza over the previous decade and dug dozens of cross-border attack tunnels, including one that notoriously emerged right next to a kindergarten.

Ramadi, incidentally, is far from the only example of the way the Obama Administration and Europe hold Israel to a double standard. On Monday, the Elder of Ziyon blog highlightedanother one: According to the Herald Scotland, “The British government is refusing to accept evidence of civilian fatalities in UK air strikes from human rights groups monitoring the results of bombing raids” in Syria and Iraq; instead, it relies exclusively on “evidence from its own internal surveillance.” But that same government uncritically accepted NGO reports saying that almost 70 percent of Palestinian casualties in Gaza were civilian, even though Israel scrupulously investigated those reports and found that in reality, about half the casualties were documented members of either Hamas’ military wing or smaller terrorist organizations like Islamic Jihad.

I don’t really expect any Obama Administration or European official to admit to having unjustly criticized Israel during the Gaza war. But any fair-minded person comparing the devastation of Ramadi to that in Gaza should reach the same conclusion a group of high-ranking Western military experts did in a comprehensive report issued last month: that during the Gaza war, Israel “met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations’ militaries.”

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The hypocrisy of the United States and other Western powers concerning Israel is well-established fact. The European Union is too foolish to even understand that it is being hypocritical.

Charles Malik: The West Is the Problem

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Charles Malik was a former president of the UN General Assembly, a former foreign minister of Lebanon, and a professor of philosophy. He was not only a knowledgeable insider in world politics but had the intellect to understand what was happening in a historical perspective. Malik was deeply disappointed by the West's failure to defend Lebanon as --in part and imperfectly-- an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. In 1984 he wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal where he stated:

For months now the world has been focusing on Lebanon as a problem. The problem is not Lebanon or the importance of Lebanon. The problem is the West. Indeed, the importance of Lebanon is precisely that it raises the problem of the West. Lebanon would never have been a problem if the West itself were not the problem. And the West is not only the problem but also the solution. That is its singular greatness. And the solution is to be true to the deepest value of the West: the primacyof the spirit and the freedom of the soul. [WSJ 3-28-1984]

To confirm what Malik wrote, Lee Smith points out how US policy [he refers mainly to the Obama administration] has befriended the Syrian Assad regime despite its many many offenses against the United States and against Americans:

To survive, Damascus needs the world to ignore what it is up to. It particularly needs indifference in Washington, where the Obama administration has seemed sadly oblivious to the fact that what a regime does at home is indicative of how it will act abroad—or, in the case of Syria, a state sponsor of terror and ally of Iran, how it has acted over the last 40 years, targeting especially American citizens, interests, and allies.
For all that, the administration just wants the Syria issue, the uprising, the opposition, to go away. It would prefer not to deal with it and thus has come up with all sorts of excuses to do just that.
It was five months, and many thousand dead, into the uprising before Obama called on Assad to step down. Instead of leading, the president tasked Syria policy out to Turkey, then to the Arab League, which sent a monitoring delegation led by a former Sudanese intelligence chief suspected of war crimes in Darfur.

Smith goes farther. He argues that its position on Syria, since it asked Assad to leave office, does not indicate real opposition to Assad but rather reluctance to see the Assad clan's fall. Smith raises the question of where the Obama administration and the State Dept really stand:

Unfortunately, the White House has painted itself into a corner. Because the administration has never really wanted to see Assad fall, it has talked only of stopping the violence . . . , with the unstated provision that once the murders stop, the murderer still rules. . . .

The question of where Obama & Co. really stand arises concerning the Iranian nuke bomb project as well. Bear in mind that Iran's ayatollahs are major supporters of the Assad regime and vice versa:

What’s odd is that the White House has let on, through various media surrogates, that it may come to accept the inevitability of the Iranian nuclear program and move toward a policy of containment and deterrence. . . . In its dithering on Syria, the administration shows a lack of seriousness in dealing with Iran. . . .

Yet the Assad regime, going back to 1983 at least, has a record of killing offcial Americans as well as American troops in both Lebanon and Iraq:

Under Assad the Damascus airport was a jihadist transport hub from which foreign fighters were either bused directly to the Iraqi border to fight U.S. troops, or warehoused in Syrian prisons until they could be put to some use. Washington knew very well that Syrian intelligence was working with al Qaeda because it had evidence of it in the Sinjar documents, showing that 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq were coming through Syria. When a series of suicide bombings killed hundreds of Iraqis in the fall of 2009, the Obama administration hushed Iraqi officials who pointed a finger at Damascus. In other words, al Qaeda’s position in Syria was a problem U.S. officials were content to ignore when, with the help of Assad’s intelligence agents, the organization was killing American troops and Iraqis. But now the fact that al Qaeda elements, which may still be under the control of Syrian intelligence, are targeting regime installations, is a reason not to support the opposition [here Smith is pointing at Obama administration hypocrisy]. . . . The regime in Damascus that has so much Syrian blood on its hands also, along with its allies in Iran and Hezbollah, has killed many thousands of Americans. In Lebanon, U.S. Marines, diplomats, and intelligence officials were slaughtered by Iranian and Syrian assets; in Iraq, the Syrians and Iranians backed both Sunni and Shia fighters in their war against American troops, leaving almost 5,000 dead and many more thousands wounded [The Weekly Standard, 5 March 2012]

So the Assad regime in Syria has been an enemy of the United States and of Americans, including rank and file soldiers plus diplomats and intelligence officials. Yet the Syrian Assad regime was being coddled by the State Dept in the mid-1970s, under Kissinger and since then. The Baker-Hamilton Report drawn up for the Bush 2 administration in about 2006 recommended helping solve all Middle Eastern problems by pressuring Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Assad-ruled Syria. Apparently, Israel's welfare was secondary to Assad regime welfare. Or just how does one explain the situation that Lee Smith describes together with my extending the picture of Washington indulgence of the Assads back to the mid-1970s?

Zbig Brzezinski Wants to Protect the Iranian Bomb Project

Zbig and Jimmy Carter helped Ayatollah Khomeini take over Iran in early 1979, unceremoniously pushing out the Shah, an American ally. By aiding --even sponsoring-- Khomeini's takeover, the Carter administration opened the road for Ahmadinejad, the current Iranian president, who is presiding over a project to develop nuclear bombs in violation of Iran's commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Neither Pres. Obama nor Pres. Bush before him is showing any real determination to stop this very dangerous eventuality from coming to fruition. Zbig Brzezinski must feel that he did not do enough damage when Carter was president. He now urges the Obama administration to protect the Iranian Nuclear Bomb project from Israel, although Israel has grounds under international law and the UN charter to attack Iran and destroy its bomb-making efforts, since Iran under A-jad has already threatened to destroy Israel. Here is Zbig at his best or his worst [about the same]:

The national security adviser for former President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, gave an interview to The Daily Beast in which he suggested President Obama should make it clear to Israel that if they attempt to attack Iran's nuclear weapons sites the U.S. Air Force will stop them.

"We are not exactly impotent little babies," Brzezinski said. "They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? ... We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a 'Liberty' in reverse."

The USS Liberty was a U.S. Navy technical research ship that the Israeli Air Force mistakenly attacked during the Six Day War in 1967.

Brzezinski endorsed then-Sen. Obama's presidential campaign in August 2007, which at the time was portrayed in the media as a boost to Obama's foreign policy cred. The Washington Post reported: "Barack Obama, combating the perception that he is too young and inexperienced to handle a dangerous world, got a boost yesterday from a paragon of foreign policy eminence, Zbigniew Brzezinski."

Brzezinski was never an official campaign adviser, but Republicans jumped on the endorsement to push the meme that Obama wouldn't be a friend to Israel, as Brzezinski's views of Israel attracted criticism from some quarters in the American Jewish community.

“Brzezinski is not an adviser to the campaign,” former Ambassador Dennis Ross, then a senior adviser on Middle East affairs to the Obama campaign, said at the time. “There is a lot of disinformation that is being pushed, but he is not an adviser to the campaign. Brzezinski came out and supported Obama early because of the war in Iraq. A year or so ago they talked a couple of times. That’s the extent of it, and Sen. Obama has made it clear that on other Middle Eastern issues, Brzezinski is not who he looks to. They don’t have the same views.”

Brzezinski plays no role in the Obama administration; the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. [ABCNews 20 Sept 2009]

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Note Zbig's contempt for Iraqi sovereignty. He describes Iraqi airspace as "our airspace," that is, United States airspace. However, allowing Iran to get the Bomb is not healthy for the American people --or for the rest of the world for that matter.
Also note that Zbig's hostility to Israel is palpable in the quotes above. He surely hates Israel more than the current Iranian regime, if he is opposed to them at all in any way.
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Earlier posts on Zbig on Emet m'Tsiyon [here & here]

Jim Baker Makes Things Worse in the Middle East -- He's an Old Hand at Creating Chaos & Befriending Oppression

Condi Rice, US secretary of state, is a follower of the Bakerite religion which came back into vogue in Washington in 2006. She recently testified to a congressional committee that many problems in the Middle East were because of Israel's presence in the region, although she was not specific. This is the position of many in Washington and has long been a theme heard there, especially from oil industry defenders, pro-Arab lobbyists, and some of those who call themselves "realists," not to mention most of what is called the "Left." By blaming Israel, they exemplify what in psychology is called projection. That means projecting on someone else what you yourself are doing or want to do. So they blame Israel for causing problems.

Baker himself is an old hand at Middle Eastern troublemaking. Many of the corpses littering the Middle Eastern landscape can be attributed --in part at least-- to Baker's policies. To this day, Baker's "realism" or cynical hatred for people causes problems. Some of his earlier doings as secretary of state have caused enduring trouble. Let's take Lebanon as a case in point. Lebanon has been bedevilled for years by Syrian hegemony, up to 2005, and since then by Syrian efforts to return and retake control of the Land of the Cedars. Here is Michel Gurfinkiel on Baker's illustrious accomplishments in and for Lebanon:

. . . in August 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait. The Americans knew several months before that such an operation was being prepared, but did not react as vigorously as one might have expected. For Baker, there was a dilemma between interest and interest. Kuwait, like the other Gulf monarchies, was situated at the heart of the American-Arab petroleum partnership. But Iraq too was a first rank oil producer and seemed to form moreover, in the 1980s, a rampart of those same monarchies against Khomeiniist Iran [bear in mind here that Baker's forerunner as a "realist" US foreign minster, Zbig Brzezinski, had helped Khomeini take over Iran]. What is more, Baker had "advised" --in a personal capacity-- both of those countries [Kuwait & Iraq]. In the end, the secretary of state [Baker] adopted the worst possible attitude. On his instructions, the American ambassador April Glaspie let Saddam Hussein understand in July 1990 that "the United States did not have an opinion on the border conflict between Iraq and Kuwait." The Iraqi dictator interpreted this as an implicit approval of his planned invasion.

For several weeks, Baker tried to dissuade George H W Bush from freeing Kuwait by force. The American president only made a final decision in that direction on the recommendations of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Then Baker made a strategic and diplomatic "reverse shift." He won over another Baathist dictatorship, Syria, to the anti-Iraqi operation by allowing it to occupy Lebanon in its entirety, including the last Christian bastions. In other words, the United States authorized one Arab country [Syria] to subjugate another [Lebanon] in order to prevent a third [Iraq] from absorbing a fourth [Kuwait]. It might well be, obviously, that Baker wanted to create --through a Syrian protectorate over Lebanon-- a precedent applicable to Kuwait, as long as Saddam Hussein renounced formal annexation [of Kuwait]. Up to 9 January 1991, the American secretary of state was negotiating with the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs, Tariq Aziz, in the hope of finding a compromise [allowing Iraq to keep on occupying Kuwait without formal annexation].
[Michel Gurfinkiel, "Rapport sur Baker" France-Israel Information (Oct-Nov-Dec 2006), p 25]

Here is Gurfinkiel's key phrase above in the original.

En d'autres termes, les Etats-Unis autorisent un pays arabe a` en subjuguer un autre afin d'interdire a` un troisie`me d'en absorber un quatrie`me.

Baker boggles the mind. He is quite a troublemaker all by himself. Can we find anybody to equal his skill at wreck and ruin? The cartoonist Al Capp who drew the Li'l Abner comic strip had a character named Joe Btspflk. Joe always had a cloud over his head wherever he went and wherever he went there was trouble. Joe Btspflk was the artistic representation of James Baker before his time.
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Coming: Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron, peace follies, propaganda, more on Jim Baker versus Israel, etc.