Analyst: With Blind Israel Support, US Becoming Global Pariah it Attempted to Make Russia Into
© AP Photo / Evan Vucci
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As the US rushes to support Israel in its war with Hamas regardless of the civilian costs, much of the Global South is breaking with Washington, which it sees as a “huge hypocrite,” a human rights lawyer told Sputnik. The geopolitical shift is undermining US efforts to gather support for Ukraine.
The Biden administration has continued to firmly back Israel after two weeks of war in the Gaza Strip, refusing calls for a ceasefire and blocking attempts in the United Nations to bring a stop to the fighting. While Hamas’ initial and unprecedented attack on Israeli border towns killed more than 1,300 Israelis, the all-out siege and bombing campaign in Gaza has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians. Now, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are gathering their strength for an invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas, ordering 1.1 million people to evacuate.
The shocking destruction of the conflict had sharply divided the world into supporters of Israel and of the Palestinians, with citizens and governments alike either demanding a ceasefire, or sending money and weapons to Israel, or even joining in attacking Israeli forces from nearby countries. As a consequence, the conflict in Ukraine is no longer dominating headlines, and as one senior diplomat from a Group of Seven nation told a London-based newspaper earlier this week, the dissonance in Washington’s positions has undermined efforts to win global support for Ukraine and to isolate Russia.
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” the diplomat said. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
“What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” the diplomat added. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”
US labor and human rights lawyer, writer and activist Dan Kovalik told Radio Sputnik’s The Critical Hour that in fact, Moscow was never a global pariah, it’s the G7 nations that have isolated themselves from the majority of humanity.
“The majority of countries, representing a majority of the world's people, have been backing Russia ever since the special military operation began last year. But even putting that aside, I mean, I think the point is well taken that the US claims to be so offended that Russia, in their words, ‘invaded Ukraine’ … now the US is is backing Israel to the hilt in an assault on Gaza, which is much worse in terms of its intended effect on civilians, than Russia's intervention in Ukraine.”
“Especially in light of the bombing of the hospital that killed at least 500 people in an instant - there's no type of incident like that that we know of in Russia's intervention in Ukraine. And the number of children killed: Israel's killed over a thousand children in Gaza since in the last, what, ten days or so - again, that's on a scale that has not happened in Ukraine. So, yeah, the US looks like a huge hypocrite and that's obvious to the world.”
However, the hosts noted there was one way the US had been consistent: in both Israel and Ukraine, US President Joe Biden has intervened to shut down potential peace deals championed by Russia and China in favor of keeping the conflicts going.
“The US does this time and time again,” Kovalik pointed out. “It kills peace in order to keep the wheels of war moving.”
“The US has been incredibly consistent with that over the years. I mean, what comes to mind is the US killed the Geneva peace accord that had been reached in 1954 to end the war between Vietnam and France, it turned out Henry Kissinger killed the peace deal that Johnson helped negotiate between the US and Vietnam in 1968 to end the war, the US - twice - killed peace deals in the former Yugoslavia to pave the way for the NATO bombing of Serbia for 78 days in 1999,” he said.
20 October 2023, 12:55 GMT
Turning to the anonymous G7 diplomat quoted by the British newspaper who said the US had lost its credibility with the Global South by backing Israel, Kovalik noted that the US’ actions have been disproving its peaceful rhetoric for decades with numerous interventions and meddling to undermine the sovereignty of other countries, including nearly every nation in Latin America.
“The US helped draft and signed on to the UN charter, which was obviously supposed to create an international law system to maintain international peace and security, but the ink on that wasn't dry before the US was undermining that in the war in Korea that it started. So yeah, the world isn't surprised at the US' flouting of international law and hypocrisy about following international law. Though, I do think the US at least believed it had some moral high ground when Russia intervened in Ukraine, it allowed the US to at least say, ‘that was wrong and we're not going to do that’. And then of course they turn around and they support Israel in doing something much worse.”
“So, I do think it is a stark example to the world of the US' hypocrisy and certainly an occasion for countries who always thought the US was hypocritical to take the time to jump on the US and say, ‘look, we can't follow you, you know.’ And also look at what happened at the UN Security Council where you had a resolution that Russia put forward for a ceasefire in Gaza and the US was the only country to veto that.”
Kovalik went on to say that the US has always sought to replace impartial international law with what it calls the “rules-based international order.”
“Since the main international law, the UN Charter, was agreed to back in 1945, the US has done everything it can to undermine that because it wants the law to apply to everyone but itself,” he noted. “But any such ‘law’ is no law at all. The law works only if it applies to everyone equally - to the weak and the strong equally. And if it doesn't, that's not law, that is the rule of the jungle.”
17 October 2023, 18:35 GMT
“I mean, the US will soon stand alone in the world because even now Western Europe is turning on the US, because they see not only the US' hypocrisy, but they now understand what a lot of us have known for a while, and that is that the US’ proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has been as much about undermining Europe as it is undermining Russia,” Kovalik said. “The US cut Europe off from its gas supply that Russia has been giving Europe for decades, even when it was the Soviet Union. And those economies are now suffering and governments are now coming to power in Europe that will not back the US in this proxy war anymore,” Kovalik told Sputnik.
“So I think the US will find itself to be the pariah country in the world.”
