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Over the past two weeks, the world has looked on in ominous horror as the military might of Israel, fully supported by both the US and Britain, has waged a relentless onslaught on the citizens of the besieged Gaza Strip; with what had initially begun as protests against the eviction of six Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, and the subsequent storming of the al-Asqa Mosque by Israeli police the following day, soon escalating into a full-fledged military assault on Gaza, one which has already drawn comparisons with the 2014 war which resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians in the space of 7 weeks.

Although the ongoing violence has garnered worldwide media attention, an unusual occurrence of events in the Middle East, one glaring double-standard remains so far in all mainstream media coverage; the lack of calls for sanctions, regime change and a ‘humanitarian intervention’ that would be trumpeted by every corporate media outlet had Israel been a country opposed to the aims of the US-NATO hegemony, cases in point being both Libya and Syria.

In Feburary 2011, following Muammar Gaddafi’s decision to pursue a ‘Gold Dinar’ currency, one which would have ended any reliance by Tripoli on the US Dollar, a regime change operation was quickly launched by then-US administration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden which saw the arming, funding and training of Salafist terrorists (linked to al Qaeda) seeking to overthrow the Libyan Arab Jamarihiya.

Lauded as ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘rebels’ by the Western corporate media, these groups soon overran the North African country; with a ‘humanitarian intervention’ and No-Fly Zone subsequently being launched by NATO in March 2011 in response to alleged ‘human rights abuses’ by Tripoli; ultimately resulting in the capture, brutalisation, and murder of Gaddafi by US-backed terrorist groups in October of that year, his once thriving nation left in ruins and still remaining in turmoil a decade later.

Similar to Libya, a regime change operation was also launched in Syria in March 2011, this time in response to Bashar al-Assad’s 2009 refusal to allow Western-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country, and which also seen the arming of Salafist terrorist groups, seeking to depose Assad’s secular leadership, by the Obama administration alongside David Cameron’s Tory government in Britain.

Unlike Tripoli however, Damascus has successfully withstood the onslaught of NATO-backed terrorists over the past decade, with an Iranian intervention in 2013 on behalf of the Arab Republic, and a further Russian intervention in 2015, again at the request of Damascus, both playing a key role in the defence of the Middle Eastern nation.

The ire of Washington’s neocons would soon be drawn however, both in 2017 and 2018, when two separate false-flag chemical attacks led to calls from the Western corporate media, in full compliance with the Military Industrial Complex, for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ against Damascus; calls which almost came to fruition on both occasions when the Trump administration launched cruise missile attacks and air strikes against Syrian government targets, just stopping short of a full-scale Libya-style intervention which could have easily sparked a wider conflict between the United States and Russia.

When it comes to the documented violence that Israel has inflicted on the Gaza Strip over the past fortnight however, no such calls have been made by the Western media for a No-Fly Zone to be imposed by NATO over the Palestinian held territory in a bid to protect its inhabitants, or for US Navy Destroyers to fire Cruise Missiles towards Tel Aviv.

With the United States being a key ally of Israel since its establishment in 1948, the Zionist lobby has long played a decisive role in guiding Washington’s foreign policy; with lobbying for the Iraq war being done by Benjamin Netanyahu himself in the run-up the 2003 US-led invasion of the Arab country – Israeli involvement has also played a key role in the Syrian regime change project, with Damascus being a long-time opponent of the Zionist State.

Therefore, it is this long-time partnership between Tel Aviv and Washington that will see the current outrage by the Western media towards Israeli atrocities in Gaza amount to nothing more than empty rhetoric – a far different response to the calls for sanctions and military action that would currently be taking place had Israel been a nation refusing to kowtow to US-NATO Imperialist demands.

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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist based in Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the impacts of British and US Imperialism. He is Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News.

Featured image is from The Unz Review