Finian Cunningham

Israeli genocide is American-sponsored genocide

US top diplomat John Kerry says a ceasefire deal in Gaza is close but there is still a way to go for one to be implemented.

What's the hold-up? Men, women and children are being slaughtered in their hundreds. Hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, the wounded are being attacked against all norms of international law and morality.

The main Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, says that any truce must be the basis for further talks on the underlying issues of Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and by extension on other parts of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. That is inarguably reasonable and common sense.

But the Israeli regime doesn't want to engage in discussions about the bigger issues. It says that a ceasefire should be negotiated first and then, at some unspecified later time, talks about underlying issues can be held. Of course, this seemingly two-part deal from the Israeli side is but a cruel, cynical joke. It will never talk to Hamas. Indeed, the Israeli regime will never seriously talk to any Palestinian faction about the wider issues. A ceasefire for them is just a punctuation mark in a long story of ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their historic homeland.

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Finian Cunningham

In a devastating twist to emerge over the weekend it now seems that the Malaysian civilian airliner downed over Ukraine was most probably brought down as a result of sabotage by the US-backed Kiev regime.

The purpose of this audacious act of mass murder – in which 298 lives were lost – was carried out with the intention of framing the Russian government. Washington, the chief sponsor of the Kiev regime, must have known about the plot, if not being fully complicit in it.

The key to this dramatic twist is the identification of incriminating audio tapes over the weekend as fake – tapes that were created initially to implicate Moscow, as part of a massive black operation involving the destruction of the civilian airliner and all those onboard. Nationals from more than 12 countries were onboard the doomed Boeing 777, most of them Dutch, Malaysian, Australian, as well as American, Canadian, British and several other European states.

Within hours of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashing into a wheat field in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine last Thursday, Western governments and media have gradually stoked a frenzy of accusations that Moscow had a hand in the disaster. US President Barack Obama announced that unnamed American intelligence sources said that the suspected surface-to-air missile believed to have taken the jet down was fired from territory held by anti-Kiev self-defence militias. Or as Obama put it: «Russian-backed separatists».

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Finian Cunningham

The Western propaganda machine is trying to sell Ukraine's so-called Candy King as the democratically elected new president of that crisis-torn country.

The billionaire Petro Poroshenko is being presented as a self-made entrepreneur-turned-politician, who will bring to Ukraine "enlightened Western democracy and free markets".

As usual, this is typical Western propaganda inverting reality. The 48-year-old Poroshenko is certainly pro-Western, but not for benign reasons. He made his wealth, along with his father and several other oligarch figures, by operating ruthlessly as a vulture capitalist, seizing state assets belonging to the old Soviet Ukraine during the 1990s.

One of his businesses is the manufacture of chocolates, but Poroshenko has several other "interests" including ownership of news media that engages in gutter journalism to spread his belated "anti-Russian" politics and further his own selfish ambitions.

The Chocolate King has fingers sticking with corruption, with serious accusations against him over underworld dealings in drugs, prostitution and illegal arms trade. That such a sinister figure is now being presented by the US and European governments in such a positive light is like a dizzying sugar rush to the head.

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Finian Cunningham

A Ukrainian helicopter Mi-24 gunship fires its cannons against rebels
at the main terminal building at the airport in Donetsk, May 26, 2014.

Moscow would be better to condemn this regime, as it did until recently, and the sham election that this imposter-junta is foisting on the Ukrainian people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told the international business conference in St Petersburg that his government would recognize the results of the presidential election being held this weekend in Ukraine.

That seems to signal a significant concession by the Russian leader to placate the Western-backed regime in Kiev.

Only a few weeks ago, Moscow's position was that the Ukrainian presidential election was not legitimate. That was because, rightly, it is being organized by a regime that seized power illegally from the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych on 23 February. That coup came on the back of nearly three months of street violence in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, during which more than 100 civilians and state security personnel were gun downed by snipers. There is convincing evidence that many of these deaths were carried out with the complicity of Washington and its covert forces working in collusion with the coup plotters. On the face of it, that represents a huge criminal interference in Russia’s strategically important Western neighbour.

Putin told delegates this week at the conference in St Petersburg that he still views the Kiev coup to be unconstitutional, and he laid the blame squarely on Washington and its European allies for orchestrating the criminal overthrow of the elected Ukrainian authorities.

So, it seemed a strange logic from the Russian leader to now say that Moscow will “respect the will of the people”.

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Finian Cunningham

When US President Barack Obama opened his tour of Europe [laast time] it had the unmistakable choreography of a scripted set piece: lights, camera, action etc. The storyline is a familiar trope. America, the shining beacon of democracy and human rights, comes to the rescue of European damsels in distress just before they are ravaged by bestial European recidivism for war.

European political figures of increasingly low caliber are indulging this American parody of reality by appearing to unite around Obama’s call for tougher sanctions against Russia. Britain’s David Cameron and his German and French counterparts, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, issued warnings of imposing economic penalties on Russian businesses and industries. Lots of bombast and melodrama were on cue, but there was a distinct lack of guts to follow.

For Obama’s European visit this week it seemed more than a coincidence that the president made his first public statement from an Amsterdam museum. The choice of such a rarefied venue to launch Obama’s shuttle diplomacy may at first seem odd.

As the Washington Post reported: «President Obama delved into a day of diplomacy Monday as he sought to rally the international community around efforts to isolate Russia following its incursion into Ukraine».

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Finian Cunningham

This week sees commemorations that mark the end 69 years ago of World War II. In reality, the war never ended. It continues to this day.

That may seem an oxymoron to many. Of course, it will be said, the Second World War ended in May 1945. Nazi Germany was defeated, as were other European fascist forces. Was peace not brought to Europe and henceforth decades of harmony and prosperity reigned, under the benign auspices of Pax Americana?

Well, yes, in a narrow sense the war was formally closed. But the underlying forces that engendered that war are still active today, discernible only if we debunk Western media propaganda.

This ongoing reality of conflict is because the Second World War, as with the First World War, was not merely about belligerents confined in time and space. These conflagrations were really about imperialist power conflict and hegemony whose dynamics still persist to the present day.

The Western public, inculcated with decades of brainwashing versions of history, have a particular disadvantage in coming to a proper understanding of the world wars. It is popularly understood that the Western powers, the US and Britain in particular, fought "good wars" and took a victorious stand against despotism.

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Finian Cunningham

We know that a massacre happened in the Ukrainian city of Odessa last week in which more than 40 pro-Russian civilian protesters were killed when a public building they were seeking refuge in was deliberately set ablaze by neo-Nazi supporters of the Western-backed Kiev junta.

Apparently, the victims died from the blaze or from smoke inhalation, or when they jumped from windows to the pavement below.

But in the aftermath, new shocking images have been published in various reputable Russian media sources that tell a far more harrowing story.

Photos show victims lying on the floor of the Trade Union building who were only partially burned, with their heads and upper limbs incinerated, the rest of their bodies strangely unscarred.

Suspiciously, in many of the images the surrounding space where the bodies lay bears no evidence of fire damage.

Other victims also appeared to have gunshot wounds to their charred heads. And in one particularly disturbing image, the body of a pregnant woman is photographed bent over backwards on an office desk. The victim appears to have been garrotted; neither her body nor theoffice where her remains were found shows any signs of fire damage.

Russian media report survivor accounts saying that the rooms they were hiding in to escape from the effects of the blaze were broken into by assailants who pretended to be pro-Russian protesters. On entering the offices, those inside were attacked by the intruders.

This suggests that persons associated with the neo-Nazi crowd outside the building somehow gained entry to the Trade Union building and then systematically set about murdering those inside.

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Finian Cunningham

Residents of Slovyansk paying their respects in a memorial, set up
at the bottom of a Lenin statue, to four pro-Russian demonstrators
who recently died. (Photo: Mauricio Lima / The New York Times)

With a death toll of at least 50 over the weekend inflicted by the Western-backed unelected, fascist regime in Kiev, has the time come for Russian President Vladimir Putin to send his troops into eastern Ukraine?

The escalating violence committed by the Kiev junta under the Orwellian guise of "an anti-terror operation" strongly warrants that President Putin should give the go-ahead.

The stakes are high. Washington and its European allies, their puppet regime in Kiev and the Western mainstream media have for weeks been accusing Russia of covertly orchestrating protests in eastern and southern Ukraine. With no facts to support its claims, Washington alleges that Moscow is "building a pretext to invade and annex Ukrainian territory".

If Russia intervenes now, there will be howls of Western assertions that Moscow's "sneaky plot" is finally being executed. Already Washington is lining up more sanctions against Russia for alleged violation of Ukrainian sovereignty - again based on groundless assertions. And with NATO military forces assigned to Russia's neighboring countries, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might risk a broader war.

But regardless of Western propaganda accusing Russia of malfeasance and in the face of Western threats of punitive response, Moscow should act with boldness based on the facts.

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Finian Cunningham

There seems little doubt that the arrest of Irish republican leader Gerry Adams this week over alleged involvement in a tragic murder 44 years ago is politically motivated.

The political interests pushing this agenda have no respect for victims of Ireland's recent 30-year conflict. These interests are being selective in their focus on victims, cynically vying for political gain, and in particular to damage the rise of Sinn Fein, the Irish republican party.

Later this month, Ireland is heading into European Parliamentary elections, which up to now was promising to see major electoral gains for Sinn Féin, the party of which Adams has been president of since 1983.

In recent years, Sinn Féin has emerged has the fastest growing political party in both the British-occupied north and the independent southern state. It has become the second biggest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, while in the southern legislative chamber, Dail Eireann, Sinn Féin has seen its number of parliamentarians expand three-fold over the past three elections to become an increasingly pivotal force there.

Sinn Féin can rightly claim to be the only all-Ireland party with representatives and organizational structure that transcend the British-imposed border, which partitions the island into northern and southern jurisdictions. Sinn Féin is distinguished from all other political parties by its manifesto calling for a united, independent country.

That manifesto not only threatens the British interest of maintaining its political presence in the North of Ireland; the so-called Irish political parties in the South of Ireland also see their establishment interests challenged by the growing popular support for Sinn Féin and its calls to shake-up the stagnant status quo on both sides of the border.

This is the important context in which the Sinn Féin leader was taken into custody this week by police in Northern Ireland. Adams has not been charged but his arrest over the murder took many observers by surprise, coming seemingly out of the blue. The allegations will revive memories of a dark episode in Ireland's 30-year conflict.

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Finian Cunningham

Western countries are now paid so badly that businesses are reportedly finding it profitable to return from China - having relocated to Asia in the first place to exploit cheap labor there.

It is an astounding indictment of how capitalism has created a global race to the bottom of misery for workers - yet the Western corporate news media actively conceal this abomination.

This week a BBC business report sounded almost celebratory about the fact that Britain, the US and other Western countries were now said to be "cost competitive" with China and Brazil. The upshot is that many businesses and companies are now re-setting up in Western countries because of the "competitive" wages of workers, according to the BBC spin. The competitiveness, said the BBC, stemmed from workers' wages in the West being "held steady" and because they have "become more productive".

This is Orwellian language to obscure the conditions of systematic poverty and exploitation that exist for many workers in Western countries - the scale of which is so appalling that companies are finding Western countries more profitable than other destinations that were formerly thought of as providing cheap labor.

Such companies had previously closed down, or as the Orwellian language called it "downsized", operations in the US, Britain and other Western countries to boost their profits by taking advantage of low wages in China.

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