America’s Worthless Values

“Everyone, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons, deserves to live in dignity,” the State Department pontificates. Everyone? How about Palestinians?

The disproportionate deaths among Palestinians speak of a one-sided slaughter. Over 200 have been killed – almost a quarter of them children – during the past week of violence.

It’s a sickening pattern that is seen every time there is an eruption of conflict.

The horrific death toll will likely escalate as Israeli leaders ignore international appeals for a truce, vowing to continue airstrikes “as long as necessary”. The Israelis call it “mowing the grass”. How abominable and twisted is this modern-day Warsaw Ghetto scenario.

Meanwhile, the number of Israelis killed from Palestinian rockets stands at 10, including two children. A 20-fold difference in casualties reflects an outrageous use of indiscriminate and excessive lethal force by the Israelis.

At yet for the third time in the past week, the Biden administration has vetoed international efforts at the United Nations Security Council to call a ceasefire. This is while whole families are being obliterated in airstrikes carried out by hundreds of Israeli fighter jets bombing homes with tonnes of explosives in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

Both President Joe Biden and his top diplomat Antony Blinken refuse to condemn Israel’s slaughter, repeating their mealy-mouthed support for Israel’s “right to self-defense”. What’s so right about killing children in their beds? Or relentless airstrikes preventing even rescue teams from retrieving bodies from under rubble? Or bombing a media tower housing international news services? The latter apparent war crime appears to have been carried out to prevent media from reporting on other war crimes.

America stands isolated in its shameless support for Israeli crimes. The Biden administration in particular is busted over its rank hypocrisy and virtue-signaling.

Since coming to office four months ago, President Biden and his team have waxed lyrical about “rules-based international order” and “democratic values”. They talk about the world being in a historic struggle between “democracy and autocracy” with the Americans being the presumed virtuous ones, of course. Biden and Blinken lecture Russia and China about human rights.

The nebulous virtue-signaling and rhetoric about values are always in the abstract and are laid on with heaps of media propaganda. For example, we’re supposed to believe China is committing genocide against its Uighur Muslim population. No evidence is provided and the so-called American information is really disinformation sourced from dodgy ideological think thanks, as documented by independent journalists at the commendable Grayzone.

Yet, by contrast, here we have a real-life situation in which the U.S.-supplied Israeli military is inflicting an onslaught against Muslims (and Christians) crowded together in the open-air concentration camp known as Gaza. And the Americans are busted for the abject frauds they are.

One phone call from Biden telling Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu that Washington is going to cut off its annual $3.8 billion aid would put an end to the blitzkrieg. But that’s not going to happen because Biden and Blinken are ardently pro-Israel. But not just Biden and Blinken. Washington’s imperial power projection in the Middle East relies on Israel. The Israelis can thus do whatever they like knowing that American administrations will turn a blind eye to crimes of illegal occupation and ongoing eviction of Palestinians from their homeland.

After Israeli warplanes bombed the media tower in Gaza at the weekend, Antony Blinken spoke with an executive of the AP agency which was among those news services attacked. Blinken offered  “his unwavering support for independent journalists and media organizations around the world and noted the indispensability of their reporting in conflict zones.”

How’s that for cynical virtue-signaling and empty values? Unwavering support for journalism? Just like Blinken’s “unwavering support for Israel’s right to self-defense”?

On Monday, while the carnage and dead bodies in Gaza are mounting, the Biden administration issued a statement marking the “International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia”. The State Department said, “the United States has endeavored to reaffirm the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons.” It added, “Everyone deserves to live in dignity.”

Everyone? How about Palestinians?

Later this week, Antony Blinken is to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for their first face-to-face meeting during the Arctic Council summit. No doubt, the conceited American will try to lecture Lavrov about “rules-based order” and Western “values”. No doubt, too, the seasoned Russian diplomat will give Boy Blinken a bit of schooling, and should tell him to go stick his worthless values on the warheads Israeli fighter jets are unleashing on Palestinian homes.

America’s Worthless Values