Iran and Gaza are Only the Beginning

The genocide in Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs. We watch this madness daily with the war on Iran, the saturation bombing of southern Lebanon and the suffering in Gaza.

International bodies such as the United Nations have been neutered, transformed into useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most psychopathic rulers of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance, opening up a vast moral abyss.

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges -- who will soon be purged -- domestically and in international bodies such as The International Court of Justice is contemptuously violated. Savagery abroad. Savagery at home.

The BBC's Lucy Williamson reports that Israel is destroying south Lebanon "using Gaza as a model - a blueprint for destruction used again as a path to peace".

Over 1 million people have already been displaced in Lebanon -- one-fifth of the entire population of a country that already hosts the world's highest number of refugees per capita -- in just a few weeks. Add to this 2 million displaced in Gaza and 3 million displaced in Iran. 6 million people rendered homeless.

For four decades Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for the U.S. to go to war with Iran. Previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have refused, in no small part because of fierce opposition within the Pentagon, which did not view Iran as an existential threat and did not project a positive outcome for the U.S. or its regional allies.

But Donald Trump, encouraged by his inept negotiating team of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner Steve Witkoff, each fervent Zionists, took Israel's bait. Britain's national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who attended the final talks between the U.S. and Iran, dismissed Kushner and Witkoff as "Israeli assets."

Joseph Kent, who resigned from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center to protest the war, wrote in his resignation letter that "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

The public rationale for the war on Iran since it began on February 28 has been protean. Is it to shut down Iran's nuclear program? Is it to thwart Iran's ballistic missile program? Is it because the U.S. carried out pre-emptive attacks on Iran, as Marco Rubio said, to ensure the safety of U.S. assets once Israel decided to strike? Is it because the Iranian government carried out lethal repression, killing hundreds of anti-government protestors during massive street protests? Is it regime change? Is it an attempt to shut down Iran's so-called state sponsored terrorism? Or are these subterfuges for something else?

Certainly, Israel and the U.S. seek regime change. But here it appears the U.S. and Israel diverge. Israel also apparently seeks, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon, the physical disintegration of Iran, the breaking apart of the country into warring ethnic and religious enclaves, the transformation of Iran into a failed state.

Persians in Iran constitute roughly 61 percent of the population with various minority groups, who often suffer state repression, making up the remaining 39 percent. These ethnic groups include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lurs, Balochs, Arabs and Turkmens, along with religious minorities such as Sunnis, Christians, Baha'i, Zoroastrians, and Jews. The shattering of Iran into antagonistic ethnic and religious enclaves would leave Israel as the dominant power in the region, giving it the ability to, if not occupy its neighbors directly, control and subjugate them through proxies, part of a long-held desire for a Greater Israel. It would also make it possible for foreign states to control Iranian gas reserves, the second largest in the world, and its oil reserves, 12 percent of the global total.

Israel's crusade against the Palestinians, the Lebanese and now the Iranians is justified by the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. But it is not lost on the Global South, especially Palestinians, that nearly all Holocaust scholars have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature and the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

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