Avoid bullies and thugs: Beware the World’s Leading War-Monger and Terrorist Organization

By Dave Lindorff

There’s an old adage that goes: “You can judge a man by the company he keeps.”

If that’s the case, then applying it to nations, the world has to judge the US to be a truly wretched and repugnant country, and should be steering clear of it.

Look at the company we Americans are “keeping” these days:

*  In Ukraine, the US is backing a thuggish regime, installed through a bloody coup that overthrew a democratically elected government. That regime, since taking power, been using indescriminately shelling cities, and using fascist thugs re-classified as National Guardsmen to slaughter civilians and separatist rebels in the eastern part of the country. It is also becoming increasingly clear, as even the main English-language newspaper in Malaysia is reporting, that this thuggish regime based in Kiev was likely responsible for the deliberate downing of a Malaysian airline which killed all 283 passengers and crew (though the Obama administration continues to claim, on the basis of no evidence, that it was the separatists’ doing).

*  In Israel, we have a government and the ironically named Israeli Defense Force (IDF) slaughtering nearly 2000 Palestinians -- over 400 of them children -- trapped in the massive open-air prison and ghetto called Gaza. For over a month, the IDF has been relentlessly bombing, shelling and rolling tanks and bulldozers over the world’s most crowded prison camp and its 1.8 million people, deliberately shelling schools, hospitals, sewage treatment and water plants, and the only power generating facility, creating an incomprehensible humanitarian crisis. Israel is the single largest recipient of US financial and military aid, and most of the death and destruction in Gaza is the direct result of US-provided arms -- weapons that include flesh-shredding anti-personnel shells and bombs, toxic gas and illegally used white phosphorus incendiary weapons. In fact, the US rushed more such deadly weapons to Israel as the IDF ran its stocks down in this one-sided assault on the walled-in Gaza-wide free-fire kill zone.

• Over in Syria, where the US has been covertly supplying arms to an assortment of fanatic Islamic jihadists intent on overthrowing the dictator Bashar al Assad, we now know that it was those very jihadists, and not the Assad government, that cooly launched a deadly Sarin gas attack on a suburb of Damascus last year, killing hundreds. They did this monstrous crime in an attempt to throw blame on Assad and lure the US into joining the war against his regime -- and came within a day of succeeding. More recently we learn that those jihadists, many of whom were trained by the CIA at secret camps in Jordan, have been stoning women in Syria to death for “adultery,” often forcing local villagers unwilling to participate in such horrors to watch this medieval atrocity...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the independent new uncompromising, four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2406