If some other governments — say Russia, China or Iran — were even suspected of being responsible for Israel’s terror attacks on Lebanon, U.S. officials would be churning out denunciations.
White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby in October 2023. (White House, Oliver Contreras)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
The death toll has risen to 12 from Israel’s terror attack in Lebanon on Tuesday which detonated explosive materials hidden in thousands of pagers.
Another 20 people were then killed in another attack on Wednesday with a second wave of explosions, this time using walkie talkies and home solar energy systems.
The total death toll now sits at 32. Two children and four healthcare workers are among the dead. Thousands have been injured.
As you would expect, Western empire managers are getting really squirmy about this.
White House spokesman John Kirby adamantly refused to answer any questions involving Israel’s responsibility for the attacks during a press conference on Wednesday, despite Israel being widely reported as the responsible party, with outlets including The New York Times citing U.S. officials as their source.
“I’m not gonna speak to the details of these incidents,” Kirby said repeatedly when questioned about Israel’s role and what the U.S. response will be.
It goes without saying that if a government like Russia, China or Iran were even suspected of being responsible for similar attacks, Kirby and his fellow podium people would be not just naming the suspected aggressor but fervently denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism.
And it is here worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it is standing U.S. policy to overlook the abuses of U.S. allies while denouncing the abuses of U.S. enemies in order to undermine enemies and show other countries the perks of being aligned with the United States.
The memo showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook, then director of policy planning at the State Department, teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the U.S. government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line.
In a remarkable look into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is U.S. policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with U.S. interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.
Hook, left, with Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. NATO ambassador, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in May 2019. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“In the case of U.S. allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.
“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote.
“We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to U.S. relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”
It’s tedious saying “If Group X did this Western politicians and pundits would condemn it but because Group Y did it they’re fine with it” over and over again, but it’s important to highlight these discrepancies because they show how we’re being deceived.
[See: Reminder: US Weaponizes ‘Human Rights’]
Westerners are indoctrinated from birth into believing they live in a society that is basically good with governments that, while imperfect, are still far superior to the tyrants and corrupt autocrats of the global south.
In reality the Western power structure centralized around the United States is the single most murderous and tyrannical force on earth by an extremely massive margin, but that obvious fact is always omitted from the indoctrination curriculum.
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By pointing out the glaring discrepancies between the way the Western political-media class responds to things like Israel turning electronic devices into thousands of bombs placed throughout civilian populations and the way they respond when other groups detonate explosives among civilians, you’re helping to punch holes in the veil of indoctrination they have cast over our collective understanding of the world.
The more you recognize that you only see your society as good and others as bad because of the way world events are framed by Western news media and politicians, the closer you get to having your, “Are we the baddies?” epiphany.
Hypocrisy and contradiction are not great moral evils in and of themselves, but they often run cover for great moral evils.
The fact that we are trained to think about the world by people who facilitate great evils perpetrated by their own side when they’d condemn identical evils committed by their enemies shows that they do not stand against evil, and are deeply evil themselves.
Recognizing the problems in our world is the first step to solving them. That’s what the propagandists and empire managers work to prevent us from doing, and that’s what we try to do by pointing out the glaring plot holes and inconsistencies in their narratives over and over again.
The correct thing to do when Western leaders talk about human rights or denounce abuses by enemy governments is to mock them and dismiss them.
They’re not saying anything true about their actual values and beliefs; if they were, there wouldn’t be so much hypocrisy in the way they denounce governments they don’t like for offenses they ignore and make excuses for in governments they do like.
They’re never saying what they’re saying to stop human rights abuses or make the world a better place, they’re only saying what they’re saying to undermine their enemies so that the Western empire can rule the world and be the only one administering abuse.
And the same is true of the mainstream Western press. You’ll see them completely ignore the abuses of U.S.-aligned governments while showing immense interest in alleged abuses by empire-targeted groups, often on very flimsy evidence.
Mock them and dismiss them when they act like they care about human rights abuses. They don’t care. They just want to make sure the abusive power structure they conduct propaganda for is the one in charge.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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