There are new developments in Middle East politics, and
suddenly it may be a whole new ball game, as
some Americans like to say.
Even the Washington Post belatedly reported this week that
"the spotlight has been cast anew on Sharon and the massacre [at Sabra and
Shatila] by 'The Accused,' a lengthy documentary broadcast last week by
the BBC. A number of prominent figures, including a former U.S. envoy to
the Middle East, suggest in the film that [Ariel] Sharon should or
could be convicted for war crimes."
On Monday June 18, the day after the documentary aired,
three lawyers filed a complaint on behalf of 28 plaintiffs and witnesses,
all survivors of the Sabra and
Shatila massacres, before an investigating
judge in Brussels, Belgium. Thus the first case was formally
opened against Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, on counts of war
crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
On Friday June 22, New York-based Human Rights Watch
called for a criminal investigation of Sharon.
Then, on Wednesday June 27, a Lebanese lawyer, May Khansa,
filed a lawsuit against the Israeli prime minister in Lebanon charging
that he committed the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps in 1982.
The consequences of the legal actions against Sharon, who
was reprimanded by Israel's Kahane Commission for his role in the
massacre, and the negative publicity they are almost certain to generate
are potentially devastating for extremist
Zionists' expansionist goals.
If additional courts in Europe, the Middle East, and
elsewhere accept cases
and issue indictments on charges of war crimes against Sharon,
U.S. support for Israeli excesses will certainly begin to
evaporate. The remarkably successful and
decades-long Zionist mass media campaign designed to
hyper-sensitize audiences to the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes has
had at least one unintended consequence--it has
also sensitized vast audiences to war crimes
generally and to atrocities committed against non-Jews. U.S.
politicians, even those perfectly willing to do business as usual
with the most blood-thirsty of Zionist warlords
as long as public awareness of his crimes could
be kept to a minimum, will flee Sharon like rats leaving a sinking
ship-- if and when cases against Sharon
are successful and Zionist operatives within
mainstream media are no longer able obscure and minimize his monstrous
criminality.
U.S. support for Israel will begin deteriorate
significantly even before a guilty finding if a
sufficient number of cases are brought against
Sharon and there is reason to believe that some of them are likely to
succeed--if mainstream media reportage
represents that eventuality realistically to U.S.
audiences.
No U.S. politician will long stand still at the prospect
of being linked to a widely-
recognized and legally-certified war criminal--not even a Jewish
war criminal--for doing so would necessarily put
even the most successful political career in
grave danger. If the recently-filed Belgian and Lebanese suits go
forward and others join them, the result could
very well be the most substantial blow ever
against both the heretofore impregnable "special relationship" between the
U.S. and Israel, which has always been
astonishingly disadvantageous to the USA, and what Prof.
Edward Said has called "the iron wall" in U.S. mainstream media
that admits no substantive and effective
criticism of Israel and Zionism.
This observer's examination of recent legal and political
developments in Europe suggests that America's European allies are
increasingly restless with what they
regard as American high-handedness in any number of areas.
Though it has not made
headlines internationally, the U.N. high court decided on Wednesday
June 27 against the U.S. in a case
brought by Germany in behalf of two German
nationals executed in the U.S. more than a
year ago. U.S. authorities did not notify
German consular authorities of the arrest of the German nationals, and the
two, later convicted of a murder committed
during a bank robbery, were denied access to
German consular assistance. The U.S. has apologized, but the German
government is saying, in effect, "That's not enough." In the
wake of the Bush administration's surprisingly
inept handing of the Kyoto Accords, the announcement of
plans to scrap the existing nuclear arms control agreements in
favor of a missile defense shield, and in a
long-delayed response to perhaps the most glaring, galling,
destabilizing, and long-running of all U.S. hypocrisies, consistent
U.S. blocking of all U.N. efforts to bring
Israeli criminality under control, U.S. allies in Europe and
elsewhere are now actively seeking safe ways to signal their
growing displeasure and alarm. The
role America's European allies played, or didn't play, in U.S.
exclusion last month from the seat it had held
from the day of the creation of the U.N. human
rights commission, was no accident. Nor was U.S. exclusion from a
U.N. group that
oversees drug policy matters.
If European and other governments can withstand the
pressures that the U.S. and Israel are sure to
apply, and the cases against Sharon go forward, it
could well be that the world will witness a truly rare event in the
annals of legal history, the sitting
prime minister of a supposed democracy convicted of war crimes.
While, sadly, it is not terribly unusual for
national leaders to succumb to the temptation to
abuse their power and commit war crimes, it is
most unusual for a supposed democracy to elect
as its national leader a man previously, in effect, convicted of war
crimes by his own country's government.
Where such hubris rules, can nemesis be far behind?
Israelis, and their all-powerful American supporters,
would be well advised to take a look over their
shoulders.
