Stephen Lendman

Israel has used phosphorous bombs against civilians. This is a war crime.

The well-established universal jurisdiction principle (UJ) holds that certain crimes are too grave to ignore, including genocide, crimes of war and against humanity.

Thus, under UJ, nations may investigate and prosecute foreign nationals when their country of residence or origin won't, can't, or hasn't for any reason. Israel used it to convict and execute Adolph Eichmann. A US court sentenced Chuckie Taylor, son of the former Liberian president, to 97 years in prison for torture.

In March 2003, the Special Court for Sierre Leone (SCSL) indicted his father, Charles Taylor, for crimes of war and against humanity. His trial at The Hague's International Court of Justice (ICC) remains ongoing.

Though never held accountable for murdering Chileans and committing other human rights abuses, Britain used a Spanish court provisional warrant to apprehend Augusto Pinochet, hold him under house arrest for 18 months, and set a precedent, making other heads of state and top officials vulnerable. Pinochet's bogus ill health claim sent him home, irreparably damaged and disgraced.

Under Article 7 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg:

"The official position of defendants, whether as Head of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."

No one deserves immunity for high crimes demanding accountability. It's time that applied to America and Israel, the two worst offenders.

In June 2009 at a Madrid, Spain conference, Raji Sourani, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) Director made the case, saying:

"Today, the Gaza Strip lies in ruins" months after Israel's offensive, killing about 1,500, injuring over 5,000, and causing vast destruction - "an illegal form of collective punishment" ongoing for over three years under siege. "For too long now, Israel has been allowed to violate international law with impunity....This situation cannot be allowed to prevail....It is for this very reason that universal jurisdiction is so important....(It) offers hope to victims throughout the entire world, in many cases, it is their only hope." It's long past time to hold Israel accountable.

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Khalid Amayreh
Occupied Jerusalem

"Bombing the Kaba" Another nuking fantasy from Ben Kjells-
secondson (the last name sounds like it was put together by
someone blindly tapping away at the keyboard). (LoonWatch)

It is one of the paradoxes of Israel that the Jewish state has a lot of support amongst right-wing and fascist groups in the West. The common factor appears to be hostility towards Islam and Muslims; in short, Islamophobia. Israel's belligerence against the Palestinians (the Christians amongst whom are overlooked by the extreme right) is championed.

However, a closer examination suggests that extreme right-wing ideology and extreme interpretations of Zionism go hand in hand. As the government coalition in Israel moves ever more to the right, it is worth considering the residual influence of the Kach Party, banned in Israel in 1988 for its extreme racist views.

Kach was formed in the early 1970s by an American-Israeli rabbi, Meir Kahane, who wrote a book called "They Must Go" in which he called for the ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from mandatory Palestine, including Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem; voluntarily if possible, by force if necessary. When his openly racist ideology was attacked as anti-democratic by mainly leftist circles in Israel, Kahane fought back, arguing that democracy was incompatible with Judaism and that faithful Jews ought to discard democracy and adopt Jewish law as the law of the land. According to his Orthodox interpretation, Jewish law treats non-Jews as slaves, and those refusing to settle for the status of slaves have to be expelled or killed.

Kahane's party was banned after he had been elected to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, mostly in order to save Israel the public relations disaster he and his party were causing the Jewish state, especially in the West. However, Kahanist ideology continued to grow in Israel, so much so that the current coalition government in Israel, headed by Benyamin Netanyahu, has been described as a fulfilment of Kahane's vision.

The rise of Kahanism in Israel has been matched by a rise in Jewish extremism in Europe and North America. Baruch Goldstein, the settlers' "hero" of the Ibrahimi (Hebron) Mosque massacre in 1994, was an American citizen who, like Kahane, migrated to occupied Palestine.

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Alfred W. McCoy

In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.

After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on Marja's outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of U.S. Marines dashed through fields sprouting opium poppies toward the town's mud-walled compounds.

After a week of fighting, U.S. war commander General Stanley A. McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's vice-president and Helmand's provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for the general's new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing government to remote villages just like Marja.

At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, however, the vice-president and provincial governor faced some unexpected, unscripted anger. "If they come with tractors," one Afghani widow announced to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, "they will have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy." For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of government control, however contested, brought with it a perilous threat: opium eradication.

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