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Read Parts I and II:
By , December 01, 2023
By , December 02, 2023
There are many facets of the obfuscation and uncertainty surrounding the events of October 7 that are quite similar to those permeating the events of 9/11. As with 9/11, the uncertainties involving the real story of October 7 provided no hindrance to immediately setting in motion a ruthless campaign of lethal military attacks on an entrapped and mostly defenceless civilian population.
After September 11, 2001, US troops were invading Afghanistan with boots on the ground within a matter of a few days. In the cases generated by the way the events of October 7 and 9/11 were reported with contrived propaganda on steroids, both the US and Israeli governments immediately engaged in drastic actions without any formal investigation whatsoever.
Thus the course of history was altered in ways that advanced the pre-existing agendas of the very powerful individuals, groups and interests claiming victimhood status. The propensity in such cases show very clear signs of deception from within. The gutter press— aka the legacy media— goes to work on fraud-infested trials by media, pre-empting any objective assessment by third-party adjudicators.
As with 9/11, the investigations into the events of October 7 that may eventually take place will most likely prove to be nothing more than a power-serving ritual. Most likely the process will end, if it takes place at all, with a conclusion that all the internal contractions between the official narrative and the evidence can be explained away with the turn of a simple phrase—“intelligence failure.”
See this.
Many reason that, at the very least, the actual evidence rather than the language of media spin points to the conclusion that key branches of the Israeli government, adopted a “let it happen” approach. Some go further. They see indications that a “make it happen” scenario is underway. Based on a survey of the existing evidence, Prof. Chossudovsky arrived at the following conclusion on Oct. 13,
Everything Points to Massive Fraud and Criminality by Netanyhu and his IDF-Mossad apparatus.
It is a criminal “False Flag” operation against Israeli civilians engineered by the Netanyahu government, which controls Hamas.
It is “A False Flag” which has resulted in the deaths of countless Israeli civilians, which in turn has provided a justification “on fake humanitarian grounds” to Netanyahu’s criminal IDF military “revenge” against 2.3 million Gaza civilians.
It is a War against Palestinians and Israelis.
And the international community applauds.
See this.
Controlling the Narrative; Deceiving the Public
In mounting the Iron Swords military campaign of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Netanyahu has acknowledged that there are many aspects of the events of October 7 which rightfully arouse suspicions that should be investigated. He indicated that an Israeli investigation, one that should include his own testimony, will have to take place at some unspecified time in the future.
So an increasingly familiar pattern is re-enacted: act first, pretend to figure out what really happened later. Almost inevitably in a sensitive case like this one, the most probable judgment will evade the main issues by declaring an “intelligence failure.” Nobody, except possibly some sacrificial patsy far down the chain of command, will be blamed and held to account.
When seen in the light of recent history, Netanyahu’s possible willingness to sacrifice the lives of his own Israeli citizens in order to advance his personal political goals as well as those of the lobbies he serves, is far from surprising. As with the 9/11 Deception, Netanyahu was an integral figure in the manufactured COVID crisis.
This invented pandemic kicked off an expanding sequence of murder and mayhem that continues to mushroom in ways that serve a very sinister global power grab. The enormous but still-largely-uninvestigated dimensions of the invented worldwide pandemic, creates the context for the accelerating campaign of depopulation, economic sabotage, and enfeeblement including through war and genocide. See this.
A horrific precedent was set by the propensity of many governments to force on their citizens a mandatory injected bioweapon that killed and injured a significant portion of the recipients without any identifiable benefits whatsoever. See this.
Gradually the concept of shrinking the global population through lethal interventions on the part of state agencies, is coming to seem acceptable to some. As I wrote in a prior Substack blog, a “death cult” is developing in popular culture. This development is reflected, perhaps, in the ready embrace, especially by some Jews and large masses of Christian Zionists, of the cold blooded mass murder of Palestinian People.
Pastor John Hagee, who preaches that Christ will soon return to rule over Earth from Jerusalem, at the "March for Israel" today in DC:
"The Bible says, he that keepeth Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps… Israel is the Apple of God's eye… There is no substitute for victory!" pic.twitter.com/xjBkpIgU0s
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 15, 2023
This worldwide pattern was especially marked in Israel where Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed in a contract with Pfizer Corp. to transform his population into test tube specimens for numerous unregulated experiments on human subjects in ways that are outlawed by the Nuremberg Code. The failure of Israeli officials to pay heed to the main international instrument laying out explicit legal requirement for experiments on human subjects, is even more shocking than the same neglect demonstrated by most medical professionals worldwide.
If even officials in the Jewish state of Israel could be so flippant about disregarding the applicability of the Nuremberg Code, what does it say about their attitude towards the genocidal events said to give rise to the Nuremberg proceedings including the famous Doctors’ Trial. As in many countries, large numbers of Israelis met and continue to meet premature deaths and illnesses as a results of the mass injections done by the Netanyahu government in a unique partnership with the criminal corporation, Pfizer.
The obstacles are usually daunting when it comes to investigating the crimes overseen by certain people when those same people control the mechanisms of criminal investigations, prosecutions and trials. The same conundrums are especially pertinent when it comes to the international crime of genocide.
Most often, the implementation of genocide is directed by powerful groups with much capacity in their home governments to limit investigations and prosecutions of crimes involving circumstances in which they are implicated. The same is true when it comes to investigating the possible October 7 crimes perpetrated in high places.
What can be expected from investigators when those doing the investigation are themselves deeply implicated in the wrongdoing they are investigating? The conflict of interest inherent in such cases is enormous. The remedy is supposed to be international criminal law conducted in courts not subject to the direct control of the nation states and those that dominate them
The United Nations’ Genocide Convention was supposed to set precedents for the broader enforcement of international criminal law. As indicated by the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility,
The Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948 and signified the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the atrocities committed during the Second World War. Its adoption marked a crucial step towards the development of international human rights and international criminal law as we know it today.
But where is there any sign of even of the existence of a UN Office for the Prevention of Genocide, let alone a willingness on the part of its members to take action during this unprecedented moment? Where are these so-called genocide preventers hiding?
Why even have such an Office or, for that matter, have the UN itself, given the degraded nature of the institution? Why is there so much difference between the zeal of the UN in 2020 to lock down our economies globally in the name of fighting COVID and then to disregard the Israeli-US genocide being pressed forward in Gaza?
Billions of people around the world are being shown in living colour on their devices, the mechanics of industrial-scale mass murder. The undeniable evidence has been right in our faces day after day for many weeks. Officials in Israel are actually openly boasting about their present and future acumen as expert genocidaires.
The pictures of mass murder on our devices come complete with the most detailed coverage ever presented on a particularly obscene instance of genocide. It is true that much of the coverage is very biased, but not all of it. However much of the most authentic coverage from reliable sources is coming at a very high cost.
According to Nasser Abu Bakr, head of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, his colleagues are being targeted for assassination one-by-one in rapid succession by the Israeli government. He indicates, “our journalists have always been a target for the Israeli military, but Israel moved from killing [an average of] one Palestinian journalist a year before October 7 to killing over one a day.”
See this.
It seems Aljazeera, the site of much deep and important coverage of the Gaza Massacre, has become a particular target of the IDF’s strategy of information management through targeted murder of journalists. The home of Aljazeera’s Gaza Bureau, Wael Al-Dahdouh, was hit with a targeted Israeli bomb. Al-Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter and grandson were killed.
Christiane Amanpour highlighted the extent of the violent reprisal imposed on her Aljazeera colleague. She continues by broadcasting an alert calling attention to the lethal perils visited on too many journalists covering the Israeli assault on Palestinians.
One such peril was manifest in the bombing attack in 2021 on the Gaza offices of Aljazeera and the Associated Press during one of the Israeli government’s periodic invasions which are frequently described in Israel as “mowing the grass.” The next year, 2022, saw an IDF member purposely shoot and kill Shireen Abu Akleh when she was doing her journalistic duty covering an Israel military unit on a mission in Jenin on the West Bank. Abu Akleh was the pioneer of an intimate style of broadcasting that continues to animate much of Aljazeer’s coverage.
An Almost Perfect Case to Prosecute Violators of the Genocide Convention and to Enforce Appropriate Punishments on Convicted Culprits?
The former UK Ambassador and renowned human rights activist, Craig Murray, is helping give form to a movement that seeks to place the UN’s Genocide Convention in the mix of possible remedies to be applied in coming to some reckoning with the overlap that imposes Israel over Palestine. Significantly, at this moment the population sizes of both groups are equal, about 7 million on each side. Murray writes,
“There is no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Numerous international law experts have said so and genocidal intent has been directly expressed by numerous Israeli ministers, generals and public officials.”
Even the Children’s Choir singing an ode to the Israeli intent to “annihilate” Palestinian “swastika-bearers,” adds to the weight of evidence that the goal of Operation Iron Swords is to not to “defeat Hamas” but to press full-fledged genocide on the targeted population.
Often in the course of genocide proceedings, the hardest thing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, is the element of intent.
What were the intentions of the accused in taking action? In this case the issue of the intention of the perpetrators is pretty much already a settled question. The larger question, however, remains. What are the major powers prepared to do about this genocide happening in Gaza and the West Bank? Will the powers of the UN Office of Genocide Prevention be set in motion by UN members pushing the system into operational mode?
The term genocide was invented at the end of WWII by lawyer Raphael Lemkin. A Polish Jew, Lemkin had observed close up in Europe the behaviour of the German government until 1941. Lemkin studied particularly the actions of German social engineers that worked, he said, on building up kindred Germanic groups and stifling the viability of unfavoured groups especially in Eastern Europe. Lemkin seemed drawn especially to the investigation of an array of tactics often involving repressions of unwanted cultures through means like the closing down of national theatres, museums, archives, libraries and schools.
The circumstances, Lemkin decided, required the introduction of some new legal terminology. At the core of his new lexicon was the term “genocide.” He introduced the term in 1944 in his new book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. See this.
In 1941 Lemkin escaped Europe to travel via the Pacific Ocean to New York. There he found powerful patrons, probably Zionists, able to create a comfortable place for him in the technocracy of the newly-created United Nations. In that capacity Lemkin worked with officials from a number of UN member states to come up with a new Convention on the Prevention and Prohibition of Genocide.
The Convention that was ratified in the UN General Assembly in 1948. It was streamlined down from Lemkin’s original conception. The government of countries like Canada that were peopled largely by immigrants and their descendants who had overwhelmed the Indigenous peoples, tried to whittle down the definition of genocide. They did not want find themselves in international court defending themselves from allegations that their countries had committed the international crime of genocide.
Many Indigenous peoples around the world would in the years to come seize on the Genocide Convention as a means of attempting some reckoning with their history of subjugation and dispossession. What makes the case of the indigenous Palestinians particularly compelling, however, is that they are presently facing the most violent and concerted military assault in history to remove a large Native society from their ancestral lands. The current genocidal onslaught makes the Palestinians generally, not just Hamas, the collective targets of modern-day genocidal campaign initiated and continued by the government of Israel without respite since 1948. See this.
The United States held back from joining the Genocide Convention until 1988. The US government waited until the Cold War was winding down to make this move. Generally speaking, the US government has held back from subjugating their country to all forms of UN jurisdiction until the Biden administration embraced the WHO’s fabrications as an integral part to the manufactured COVID crisis.
Section 2 of the Convention says,
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Many experts in law and other fields agree that military campaign that the Israeli government with US backing has initiated in Gaza after October 7, fits to a tee every definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention except item (e). See this and this.
Two Articles of the Genocide Convention following Article II are especially interesting. These articles have large implications for the present fiasco wherein so many governments and corporations have lined up as Israel’s backers, suppliers, spin doctors, publicists and such. How many of them are “complicit” with genocide?
Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Article IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
If there was to be a formal allegation of genocide coming from even one ICJ member country, the process of arbitration would be shared by two courts, both based in the Hague. One is the International Court of Justice and the other is the International Criminal Court. The job of the ICJ would be to decide if genocide was, or is, taking place and the ICC would decide what governments, institutions and individuals would be charged.
With the experience of a seasoned British diplomat behind him, Craig Murray describes the implications of what would follow from the ICJ’s determination of guilt, a ruling he finds quite likely under this particular set of circumstances. His well considered assessment is worthy of a lengthy citation. He writes,
“There is, at the very least, a strong prima facie case that the actions of the United States and United Kingdom and others, in openly providing direct military support to be used in genocide, are complicit in genocide. The point of Article IV is that individuals are responsible, not just states. So Netanyahu, Biden and Sunak bear individual responsibility. So, indeed, do all those who have been calling for the destruction of the Palestinians.
It is very definitely worth activating the Genocide Convention. A judgement of the International Court of Justice that Israel is guilty of genocide would have an extraordinary diplomatic effect and would cause domestic difficulties in the UK and even in the US in continuing to subsidize and arm Israel. The International Court of Justice is the most respected of international institutions; while the United States has repudiated its compulsory jurisdiction, the United Kingdom has not and the EU positively accepts it.
If the International Court of Justice makes a determination of genocide, then the International Criminal Court does not have to determine that genocide has happened. This is important because unlike the august and independent ICJ, the ICC is very much a western government puppet institution which will wiggle out of action if it can. But a determination of the ICJ of genocide and of complicity in genocide would reduce the ICC’s task to determining which individuals bear the responsibility. That is a prospect which can indeed alter the calculations of politicians.
It is also the fact that a reference for genocide would force the western media to address the issue and use the term, rather than just pump out propaganda about Hamas fighting bases in hospitals. Furthermore a judgement from the ICJ would automatically trigger a reference to the United Nations General Assembly – crucially not to the western-vetoed Security Council.”
Why is it that none of the states that are members of the ICJ and the UN have not yet come forward to make the complaint that genocide is taking place in Gaza and the West Bank? Why do not, say, the government of Iran or Russia or South Africa or Bolivia or Jordan or Qatar or Venezuela or some combination, step up to the witness stand to officially articulate the obvious?
One of the 149 “states” with standing at the ICJ and at the UN to make the accusation of genocide, is Palestine. As it presently stands, that complaint would have to come not from Hamas but from the leader of the Palestinian Authority, a secular organization that does not share the Islamic personality of Hamas.
Mahmoud Abbas is the leader of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas used to be known as Abu Mezan. Apparently under pressure from the United States, Yasser Arafat appointed Abbas to take over Fatah which joined the PLO after the Six Day War in 1967.
Of the longtime leader of the Palestinian Authority, Murray writes, “Abbas seems extraordinarily passive, and the suspicion that he is more concerned with refighting the Palestinian civil war than with resisting the genocide is impossible to shake. By invoking the Genocide Convention he could put himself and Fatah back at the centre of the narrative. But he does nothing.” See this.
Abbas seems to be some sort of personification of the colonialism’s comprador class. Members of this collaborator class derive wealth along with some infamy from assisting the ruling group to impose its will on subject people. This role is associated with many stigmatizing terms such as Uncle Toms, double agents, Malinches, or quislings. One website known as “Sins of the Palestinian Authority” asserts, “The Palestinian Authority today has the largest per-capita police force in the world. And yet, it uses this force to safeguard Israel’s security instead of safeguarding the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s apartheid and occupation.” See this.
It seems this problem with Abbas and the Palestinian organization he supposedly runs poses a definite problem that the Palestinian people who will have to work out for themselves if they are to seize the moment and elevate the possibility of future negotiations beyond an opening round of exchanging hostages for prisoners.
Only Victors’ Justice
Craig Murray makes it seem that the the system of international law, but especially the ICJ, is viable. I for one would like to share his optimism tempered with a smidgeon of pragmatic realism.
That pragmatism motivates me to point out that the system of international criminal law has not to this day ever significantly transcended a pattern where it is only those on the defeated side of international conflicts that face serious prosecutions and trials.
The pattern is very clear with the legal procedures imposed on the defeated side in the tribunals created at Nuremberg and at Tokyo after the Second World War. The crimes never came up of those who fire bombed Dresden, carpet bombed Tokyo, starved hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war after WWII, or nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This list is far from complete.
This same pattern was on ostentatious display with the trials of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević. Those that violate international laws such as the Genocide Convention on the winning side have enjoyed pretty much blanket impunity from all prosecution.
The fact remains that the world’s dominant controllers seem to maintain an almost absolute capacity to violate domestic and international law with impunity. Alternatively the lawless predator class at the top, regularly deploys its capacity to declare its opponents— whether, for instance, Truckers or Palestinians or January 6 protestors at the US Capitol— as a criminal classes whose member are essentially guilty until proven innocent.
These observations make it hard to see the chimera of a rule of law equally applied and uniformly enforced, as the basis for anything other than cynical fiction meant to fool the gullible. The apparent confidence so far of the Israeli and US aggressors responsible for the mass murder and destruction in Gaza, stands as a dramatic indicator of this reality.
On the other hand, significant portions of the human family can readily perceive that this reality must change substantially if civilization and even all life on earth is to be held back from bring of catastrophic ruin. Have the time and circumstances for this kind of momentous change finally arrived? Can more of us join forces to leave the spectators’ chairs and get on the field to make life-affirming changes in the making of history?
When have those high up in the military chain of the United States and Israel ever faced international criminal proceedings— that is trials, verdicts, and enforced punishments—- for any of their own transgression? Such cases must exist here and there but I can’t think of any right now. Sometimes there are isolated reports of prosecutions but then the stories seem to go nowhere, without any confirmation that laws of international crime have been adhered to outside the limitations of victors’ justice.
“Arrest George Bush, Not Me,” “Splitting The Sky” Intervenes in the Quest to Uphold the Rule of Law
I’ll end with a few brief comments on the late Dacajeweiah, the Mohawk term for “Splitting The Sky”. In my next contribution I intend to say more about him and his interventions to create momentum for the kind of changes needed now more than ever, the kind of changes already discussed in this essay.
Splitting The Sky’s life changed dramatically when he was charged in 1971 for killing a police guard during the Attica prison uprising. To this day, “Attica” identifies the most well known crisis in the history of the US penal system.
After spending many years in jail, Splitting The Sky (STS) was released. He attributed his free status largely to the lawyering of his friend, the late Ramsay Clark, a former US Attorney General who came into politics along with the ascent of John and Bobby Kennedy. STS came to Lethbridge to meet with me and we established a collaboration that included my occasional request for him to lecture to my students.
In 2009 STS contacted me to indicate that George W. Bush was coming to nearby Calgary to give his first speech as a private citizen after serving for two terms as President of the United States. In making preparations, both of us were drawn to a pre-existing movement trying to get Bush arrested for war crimes involving atrocities that he had ordered especially in Iraq.
The calculation was that Bush was most vulnerable to slipping under the authority of international criminal law when he was outside the United States.
When Bush made his plan to come to the Canadian province that is sometimes called Texas North, STS and I provided evidence to local police authorities calling on them to arrest the “credibly accused” war criminal.
We consulted with Ramsay Clark, for a time the Chief Law Officer in the United States, to advise us about how a citizen’s arrest might work if Canadian police failed to act on our request.
Here is a video of STS’s attempt to conduct a “citizen’s arrest.”
This feature of law gives an an opening to citizens to deputize themselves when law enforcement agencies and agents who refuse to do their job, thereby creating significant hazards for the public from dangerous criminals on the lose.
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Looking out at the World from Canada.
Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Girl holds improvised white flag, to tell Israel to respect Geneva Conventions and spare her fleeing family. Photo credit: Yasser Qudih
