Spent much of this afternoon watching live SABC (South Africa Broadcasting Corporation) TV as the SA lawyers made their case at the Hague of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
First came Adila Hassim, setting out in chilling detail an abundance of documented horror, 24/7 and there for the whole world to see since October.
But to nail the said horror as genocide it’s necessary to show intent. Was ever a legal threshold more easily cleared? As this site has shown, here for instance, Israel’s most senior politicians and military commanders have been in a bidding war of the psychotic, each vowing end times destruction on those animals in human form, the Palestinian people.
Over to you, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi:
Will a guilty verdict stop Israel? Don’t be daft! But it will turn the screw further on the collective West, above all Joe Biden’s Administration in an election year.
And those Yemeni fighters sending shipping rates soaring in the Bab el-Mandeb and Red Sea? Man, will they come out of this smelling of roses or what?
Israel takes the stand tomorrow. Meanwhile, do please be sure to make your way in an orderly manner to a protest event on Saturday.
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The Times of Israel reports that a UK lawyer (one Malcolm Shaw) is representing the regime of Israel at The Hague.
Quelle Suprise!
As expected, they’re pleading self defence. There’s a zillion reasons that shouldn’t wash. One is the apartheid state’s unlawful occupation but what leaps straight out at me is one of the most fundamental principles of Roman law; that of proportionality.
And now we are bombing one of the poorest countries in the Middle East where 50% of the population are suffering from malnutrition – after bombs, provided by the US and the UK to Saudi Arabia, have been purposely used to destroy Yemen’s food production and starve it into submission. And now more bombs, directly from us this time, smashing into a poor country for trying to stop, or at least protest against, a genocidal attack on a neighbour. There has always been evil but now we have weapons that have made that evil so powerful it could destroy us all, if not in a world war, in an apocalyptic destruction of the whole biosphere. Thank you for your posts Phil. I read them all. And they inspire me to continue my guerrilla tactics of conversations between ordinary folk across these dreadful divides. Otherwise there is just despair.
Spot on, Anne
And furthermore, it can be argued that the US benefits from this war (as it did/does from others, which is one reason why they keep happening). For more info see:
https://journal-neo.su/2024/01/13/who-benefits-from-a-wider-war-in-the-middle-east/
I’m hoping that Ansar Allah will sink a couple of warships in the Red Sea. That will give the Neo-cons something for their voters to think about.
Kudos Jams, for the ‘D class frigates’ comment on Larry Johnson’s site:
https://sonar21.com/u-s-is-painting-itself-into-a-corner-in-the-red-sea/#comment-211184
They don’t like it up ’em!
Thanks Dave. Off topic but expanded version below.
The Royal Navy currently has six ‘D’ class destroyers, HMS Drunken, HMS Doleful, HMS Doughy, HMS Drugged, HMS Despairing and HMS Desperate. They work on a rotation scheme where at any one time five of them are in dock for repairs and one is at sea for as long as its engines hold out. Occasionally two of the type can be seen at sea together and photos of this are an eagerly sought collectors item. They are all fitted with propellor operated anti-submarine noise generators – these can be optionally augmented by removing state-of-the-art wooden wedges from deck hatches.
The RN also has two aircraft carriers, HMS Prance of Whales and HMS Queen Elastoplast. Prance of Whales can’t go to sea as either water would mysteriously flood expensive equipment, or its propellors would keep falling off, so is used as a spare parts resource for Queen Elastoplast. Queen Elastoplast is rented out to the USN to store equally potent F-35 fighters, which are currently being converted into underwater drones. These are being tested by pushing them off the bow into the sea.
There are also a few good but obsolete frigates, two of which have just completed extensive and expensive repairs, but these two have been mothballed as the RN can’t find enough sailors in the UK to man them. Because of the extended time scale for replacement frigates, some of the current ones will be in service until 2121.
The RN are working on a new, radical propulsion system (NRPS), in which parts of the corpse of Lord Nelson (PCLN) can be motivated to spin at up to 20,000 RPM with absolutely no fuel required except for further additions (or deletions) to the fleet. Quite a Navy!
My apologies for my previous post being both off-topic (it was originally a reply to another comment elsewhere) and frivolous compared with the appalling tragedy of events in Palestine and Yemen. However, we all probably need some light relief, and it shows some (distorted) light on the RN’s Empire pretensions in the Red Sea.