Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – US arms transfers are conditioned by federal law, as the Congressional Research office explains, which “prohibits security assistance to ‘any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.’” (Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended in 1976 with Section 502B(a)(2) (22 U.S.C. 2304(a)(2)). The Biden administration’s arms transfers to Israel are therefore blatantly illegal.
But there is a difference between theoretical law and practical legality. The latter has to be adjudicated by some official body– a court, Congress, the State Department. As America’s chief diplomatic organ,the State Department would make a pretty good arbiter here.
Unfortunately, the State Department is in the hands of a genocide-denier and -enabler, Antony Blinken, whose boss, Joe Biden, is an even bigger genocide-denier and -enabler.
So State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on March 25 of Israel’s total war on Gaza, “We have not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance. So we view their assurances through that ongoing work that we have done.”
Mr. Blinken apparently does not have a smartphone, or he could have seen the unfolding war crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli military in real time. Most smart TVs have YouTube, so he could just watch Al Jazeera English live streaming. He’d see quite a lot of evidence that Israel is in violation of the laws of war and of the requirements it allow in to Gaza humanitarian aid.
Miller’s statement ranks up there with the Kremlin’s denial that its troops committed war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha or Bashar al-Assad’s denial that he had any role in the massive deaths racked up during the Syrian Civil War.
Just after Miller made his statement, a State Department official, Dr. Annelle Sheline, loudly denounced him, saying, “To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.” Sheline noisily resigned from State. She had “served for a year as a foreign affairs officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.”
The Young Turks Video: “BRAVE State Dept. Official Resigns Over Biden’s Handling Of Gaza War”
She wrote, “Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.”
Sheline was supposed to have been liaising with Middle Eastern NGOs working on human rights. None of them wanted to touch the US with a ten-foot pole. You can’t enable genocide and expect to be welcome in circles that value basic human rights. So she may as well resign. Biden and Blinken made her job impossible to do. The Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has been made a laughingstock and a pariah.
Ronna McDaniel was fired from NBC News almost immediately after she was hired, since the anchors at NBC and MSNBC denounced her for having fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. McDaniel’s behavior was egregious and she shouldn’t have been hired. The firing was entirely justified.
But Ronna McDaniel didn’t deny that it is genocide to bomb over 30,000 civilian noncombatants to death in their apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and places of worship, even in their tents once they were made refugees. Ronna McDaniel hasn’t arranged for over 100 arms sales to Israel during the past 5 months, as Joe Biden and Antony Blinken have. Maybe she would, but she didn’t.
But NBC would even now blithely bring on screen genocide denialists.
Both McDaniel on the one side and Blinken and Biden on the other are dire threats to the stability and integrity of America. McDaniel tried to undermine the state domestically, Blinken and Biden are undermining it internationally. Both are purveying the Big Lie at a time when the public can fact check it in real time.
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