America the Unfair - America the UnChampion of Democracy

Paul McGeough is like Robert Fisk, a distinguished, fair and balanced journalist-expert on Middle-East affairs, especially Iraqi, but without Fisk's leftwing baggage. He was the man who reveal to the world in mid-2004 how US pet and former Iraqi PM, Iyad Allawi, had cold-bloodedly executed 6 prisoners, who were nothing more than “suspects”, in front of his troops, it was said, to straighten up their (the troops’) spines. He shot each and everyone of those prisoners as Saddam Hussein had been accused of doing.

Now, McGeough has analysed the US-Israeli conspiracy to sabotage democratically elected Hamas of Palestine every which way, unless Hamas like Fatah complies with the dictates of Israel.

He has written his analysis so well, that rather than for KTemoc to comment or even daringly analyse his article in turn, I’ll just quote extracts of his article. Here goes, with my clarification in non-italicised straight parentheses:

“In their attempts to deny that they are clubbing together to club Hamas, the Americans and the Israelis have merely confirmed the plot as reported by The New York Times. Both governments have put on the record a dozen times their threat - and their appeals to others to join them - to freeze funds for the Palestinian Authority unless Hamas drops its belligerent opposition to the state of Israel and renounces violence.”

“… it [the US-Israeli plan to sabotage] is a wonderful lesson in American Democracy 101 for the region, isn't it? The Palestinians had their democratic election, but they're being told in this first tutorial that they got it wrong and they're going to be punished until they get it right.”

[By comparison] “It comes as that champion of Arab democracy, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, has reneged on his promise of democratic municipal elections that were to be held in April. This week, Washington gave Cairo nothing more than a slap on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf when it announced a two-year postponement of the polls that was clearly intended to protect the regime and its cronies in the face of the rising popularity of the Hamas-associated Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.”

“Washington should have grasped that Israel's resort to collective punishment has not worked against the Palestinians in the past 39 years.” [just as Nazis SS sturmtroopers found out about collective punishment in WWII]

“… they hope, .. sufficient hardship and chaos to force the collapse of the Hamas government and then another election at which Palestinian voters would be expected to vote back in the recently ousted Fatah movement - with all its corruption and nepotism - which the Israelis and Washington did so much to destroy in the eyes of the same voters.”

“Apart from a funds freeze, weapons that might be used to inflict maximum pain would include controls on the movement of people (think work and wages) and produce (think income and feeding families) from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into Israel, which the Israelis already use from time to time. Further pain might be inflicted by limits on the Palestinian use of the Israeli shekel and by cutting the Gaza Strip off completely from the West Bank; and maybe even making the Israeli-Gaza border a more rigid international frontier, according to the Times.”

You can read his article here to see that he has also provided some advice for Hamas.

But US subservience to the dictates and devious plotting of Israel makes one very aware that Palestinians cannot expect fair treatment from America.