Is the drive for war on Syria to cover up a war crime? By William Bowles

27 August 2013

According to the source, Russia’s ambassador in the UN Security Council, Vitaly Churkin, presented conclusive evidence – based on documents and Russian satellite images – of two rockets carrying toxic chemicals, fired from Douma, controlled by the Syrian “rebels”, and landing on East Ghouta. Hundreds of “rebels”, as well as civilians – including those children on the cover of Western corporate media papers – were killed. The evidence, says the Russian source, is conclusive. — Pepe Escobar

William Hague: Following in Churchill’s footsteps By William Bowles

16 June 2011

“I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” — Winston Churchill in 1920 when referring to Iraqi tribes people.

Now let me get this straight: In order to save civilian lives (the infamous ‘Right to Protect’), the Empire, through its Rottweiller NATO, not only deindustrializes Libya but it also causes a mass exodus of refugees hundreds of whom drowned and many thousands more were left stranded, attacked and abused. The Pirates attempted to assassinate Gaddafi but succeeded in killing women and children instead. The Pirates bomb educational infrastructure, communications, power, agriculture and terrorize the population from the air and sea with the combined military might of the most powerful countries on the planet. So this is what humanitarian intervention looks like?

Welcome to BBC Israel By William Bowles

31 May, 2010

The BBC has outdone itself this time with an outrageous piece of blatant Israeli propaganda

It was a tossup: should I go to the demonstration outside 10 Downing Street today (31/5/10) or write this piece on the absolutely outrageous ‘coverage’ by the BBC of the massacre of at least nineteen people by the Israeli military in international waters?

Now why can’t those damn Palestinians just disappear? By William Bowles

20 January 2009

“Gaza fought back, withstood, resisted …. Arabs are now speaking of victory, hailing the resistance, singing the praise of the Palestinians in Gaza…” — Ramzy Baroud

“We had to carry out this operation. I am at peace with the fact that we did it,” she said referring to a three-week long offensive against the Gaza Strip which killed at least 1,300 Palestinians (of which 1099 were civilians, the Gaza-based Palestinian center for human rights reported on Sunday). — Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Israeli Radio

Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of a European war, the Palestinians were made the sacrificial lamb, slaughtered in the abattoir of Capital by their executioners, the Zionists and their imperial paymasters.

Unfortunately for Israel, those damn Palestinians persisted in ‘hanging around’, jammed into refugee camps across the Middle East, ghettoized and relegated to third class people in the land of their birth, Palestine.

The ‘traditional’ view is that expunging an entire nation from the face of the Earth was somehow an atonement for European ‘guilt’ over the Nazi death camps. Looking back, I’m amazed that this idea ever gained any kind of credibility, but it became the rationale for sixty years of misery and death for the Palestinian people as well as a source of destabilization for the entire Middle East.

A burnt offering By William Bowles

16 January 2009

In 1848 a wave of rebellions swept across Europe. In the UK, every major city was occupied by protesters. The initial trigger? The ‘Irish Question’, that is to say, a failed uprising against the English colonial occupiers by the Young Irelanders who were inspired in particular by the 1848 revolution in France.

But in 1848 there was no radio, no Web, no photography, and most people never traveled more than a few kilometers from where they were born. Yet in their thousands they protested the length and breadth of the UK in support of people they had never even seen. The initial reason, Ireland, soon became a general demand for radical, that is to say, progressive change. They didn’t call ‘1848, Year of Revolutions’ for nothing.

Israel’s own Holocaust (and the US’s, and ours) By William Bowles

6 January 2009

Sitting here, relatively comfortable in freezing London, I have spent the last six hours, virtually non-stop, going through the news reports coming out of the Gaza Strip and publishing what I hope brings home the horrors of Israel’s own Holocaust.

Reflexively, I access the latest BBC report and I note that at last they are realizing that blanket approval for Israel/US genocide just won’t do. But is it enough to report the humanitarian catastrophe that is the relentless, remorseless onslaught? After all Israel’s lockdown of the Gaza Strip has been a humanitarian catastrophe for the last year.

Palestine: Collectively Punished by Israel and Collectively Punished by the media By William Bowles

22 January 2008

“No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.” — Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907, Article 50″

Fallujah – Where is the outrage? The story the mainstream media won’t tell you By William Bowles

8 November 2005

Fallujah White Phosphorus victim

A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact – Mohamad Tareq, a Fallujah resident

Although reported by a handful media outlets at the time, the mainstream media took the official US denials at face value — that there had been no use of the illegal white phosphorus weapons on the inhabitants of Fallujah in December 2004. However the newly released movie (35 mb) from Italy’s RAI News 24 television programme blows the lie out of the water. Will we now see the mainstream media report the horrific crimes committed on the inhabitants of Fallujah?

From Word Play to Gun Play:The legitimacy of the state’s right to rule By William Bowles

1 March 2005

Peter Hennessy, professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary College, London, described the way ministers behaved in the days leading up to the war as “truly breathtaking”. It casts a shadow over “the entire system of government,” he said. – The Guardian, February 24, 2005

Many on the ‘left’ may dismiss the arguments surrounding the ‘legal’ basis that underpins the obviously (to me and most of the planet) illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq as no more than a lot of hot air and obfuscation, preferring to take the ‘political’ road to judgement. But it is the ability of the state to create the fiction of its legitimacy to rule that in the final resort, is all that it has. Take away that legitimacy and ‘all that’s solid melts into air’. So what, exactly, is the legitimacy based upon? Largely, it’s the rule of law, especially when it comes to invading a sovereign state. But just what is the ‘rule’ of law?

Fallujah: Unpacking the press destroying the myths By William Bowles

12 November 2004

Western press coverage of the horror that is Fallujah has with the odd exception been nothing short of outrageous in its distortions and blatant propagandising. Even where it purports to be critical of the US in its destruction of Fallujah and its inhabitants, the sub-text continues to push the Western line of ‘foreign militants’, ‘mistakes’ and in the case of the following story, as some kind of retribution for the deaths of four US mercenaries and the beheadings by the mythical Abu al-Zarqawi.