Washington's biased foreign policy

Washington is pro-Israeli and anti-Arab, whatever excuses it makes for its foreign policy
There is an old saying which goes "Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are". As far as Washington is concerned, one only has to have a glimpse at Israel, to see that Washington's holier than thou foreign policy supposedly based on freedom and democracy, is a sham, a farce and a tissue of lies from beginning to end.

The account of a female Palestinian teacher, Wafa Abu Shmais, published online by Couples Company and edited by Nancy Horn, with an additional commentary by Laura Dawn Lewis, provides a chilling insight into the callousness and sheer brutality of the state of Israel, a state which Washington supports blindly, while at the same time slaughtering Arabs in
campaigns based on lies and torturing Arab prisoners held illegally in shocking and inhumane conditions.

Soldiers in My House is the title of the diary of English teacher Wafa Abu Shmais, a mother of four children, a diary which tells the story of the invasion of Nablus in April 2002 and the massacre at Jenin, in which houses full of screaming civilians, including children, were bulldozed by Israel's D9s.

On Wednesday 3rd April, 2002, Wafa recalls, Apache helicopters which the United States of America had sold to Israel were used to shell civilian residences with missiles in the Palestinian city of Nablus, where the first target was the civilian electricity supply (much as the USA considered the water and electricity supplies in Iraq as military targets, along with houses packed with terrified civilians).

The next morning, Wafa gives a typical example of the heavy-handedness meted out by the Israeli Defence Force, Washington's protege.  "The occupants were ordered to leave the house with their hands up and were given to the count of ten. That was all the time they were given:  we could hear the soldier counting down: 10, 9, 8 and by the time he reached 1, the doors of hell suddenly opened.  There was shelling from many directions, loud explosions, and the smell of dynamite and dust."

The policy adopted by the IDF was one of wholesale disrespect for the civilians and wholesale disregard for human life, whether it be the life of an adult Palestinian male, a woman, a child or a new-born baby. Houses were bulldozed arbitrarily, families were given ten seconds to get out. Other houses were strafed with hardware supplied by the United States of America.

This is not a warped account by an unreliable source. Moshe Nissim, an Israeli operator of a D9 bulldozer during the massacre of Jenin, speaks openly about his activity, as if he was proud: "To knock one down, I tore down several more. The residents were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I came, but I gave no one a chance to get out. I didn't
wait".

How can Washington continue to defend Israel's aggressive and murderous foreign policy, which continues today what it has always practiced in its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, in its blatant disregard for international law, in its building of an apartheid state, in its use of military hardware against civilian targets,  in its construction of colonies on lands which were stolen and which it refuses to give back?

But then again, what would Washington, the Queen of Liars, care? What to expect from a country which bases a shocking act of butchery on lies, which drops cluster bombs in civilian areas, which massacres tens of thousands of innocent people, perpetrates the most barbaric acts of torture seen since Auschwitz and Dachau and then tries to justify its actions by saying it did the right thing and that the world is a better place?

The Second World War was fought, and millions of lives were sacrificed, to make sure this sort of behaviour never happened again. Messrs Bush and Sharon have together managed to smear the collective memory of these tens of millions of people who gave their lives to make the world a better place.