Fallujah, the First Victim of the Second Term

The images shown via the BBC (among others) of rampant bulldozing of houses in Fallujah using armoured vehicles is eerily familiar of the illegal collective punishment of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Defence force using Caterpillar bulldozers. As noted by Mark LeVine, the ideology of Israel and the U.S. has converged.

The images shown via the BBC (among others) of rampant bulldozing of houses in Fallujah using armoured vehicles is eerily familiar of the illegal collective punishment of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Defence force using Caterpillar bulldozers. As noted by Mark LeVine, the ideology of Israel and the U.S. has converged. Mother Jones magazine has an excellent article on it’s blog by LeVine concerning Fallujah. An introduction by Tom Engelhardt lays out the truth of the matter:

When, for instance, our planes destroy or our troops capture a clinic or hospital, as we did in our first and second acts in Falluja, the reporting on this may be grim — patients and doctors rousted from hospital rooms, thrown on the floor and handcuffed — and yet because Americans have done this, there will be no mention of the Geneva Conventions which such an act almost certainly contravenes. (The Fourth Geneva Convention contains this clear passage: “Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.”)

The U.S. military and specifically the administration that order them are war criminals according to international standards ratified by the U.S. and the rest of the world community. Article VI of the U.S. constitution holds such international treaties to be supreme laws of the U.S. If the Nuremberg trials were running today, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith and Bush would be hung as war criminals.

Instead the medicated robots in the mid-west promote them. As Michael Feingold writes, the Bush reelection marks the end of American Christianity, as it degenerates into a tacky political movement, stripping itself of the universalism that characterises spiritual enquiry and philosophy. American Christianity has instead become an ideological wasteland denuded until only religious fringe issues related to choice of relationship and parenting options remains. The empty shell of American Christianity then becomes a receptacle for squalid authoritarian dogma, chanting a mantra of dictation, control and hypocrisy – rather than the compassion, samaritanism and identification with the oppressed that is espoused in traditional Christian philosophical writings.