From Noon Wednesday.
This midweek edition is, aptly called, The Forgotten War. Since October 7th the war in Ukraine has virtually vanished from our screens, radios and newspapers. All hands to the pump to promote the US backed Israeli regime in Tel Aviv has taken precedence over defeating Russia it seems.
Sadly, the slaughter in Ukraine continues unabated. This is a US proxy war and the Ukrainians are merely pawns of the US Military Industrial Complex and its shareholders. However, now that Israel is centre stage with their genocide in Gaza the US is giving all its attention, arms and money to the lawless rogue state of Israel. Kiev is finding out the hard way just how fickle and unreliable an ‘ally’ the US truly is when push comes to shove.
Our panel of Finbar Markey, Lloyd Quinan and Yvonne Ridley discuss the up to date happenings in Eastern Europe. We try to bring you the latest news that our corrupt western corporate media now thinks is so unimportant you do not need to know.
We also are mindful of events in Palestine and The Hague. The discussion over the delayed ICJ verdict is analysed and debated by our guests. Will there even be recognisable and acceptable international law if the court brings in a not guilty verdict? How will the BRICS nations as well as the nations of the global South along with the unaligned nations of the world react to any kind of fudge coming from the ICJ? The panel gives their views on that. Your view may differ from that of the panel, and that is OK. Unlike the corporate media we do not attempt to try and tell you what to think. We just bring you our news and views and leave you to decide for yourselves.
Get the news here that our western media tries to keep from you.
The war in Ukraine has not gone away.
The war and the genocide has not gone away.
The Israeli attack on Gaza has now extended to Lenanon and Syria.
Yemen, in support of Israel. is now under attack from UK and US military.
The US have also bombed Iraq. Iran are also now being threatened with all out war.
And in the east the axis threatens China as it pours military hardware into the area. British Conservative ministers have over recent weeks and months declared that on the not too distant future be at war with China. Some have even put a timescale on it.
And so with the UK military engaged in what is now a shooting war in the middle east and with military resources and personnel engaged in Ukraine, Great Britain is ipso facto at war.
No surprise then that it is now being announced that conscription will be needed to bolster our troops.
To the slaughter it seems our youth will have go. Like the hundreds of thousands of Ukranians killed or terribly maimed our young men and women are going to be forced, yes forced to do the same.
And for what. Why are we at war in all these foreign lands. Is it to fight, as an example the evil Palestinians who along with so many other countries across the world threaten Great Britain.
And so for what do we fight. Is it the warm cosy homes where millions suffer from fuel poverty in a land of plenty. Is it for a land where living standards for many are absolutely appalling whilst the elites and their corporate structure absolutely rinse the general populace.
The example of that two bit Tory Baroness and her husband who trousered something like £100m profit out of a £197m plastic gown and other such PPE was but a microcosm of the big big picture of the Big Rinse.
But does it need to be like this. Is there no other path we can choose. Or like rats in a trap do we proudly take it in our stride….. dulce est decorum et in pro patria mori.
Willie, no way could America, us and Europe combined hope to defeat China in a conventional war. It is likely that the Russians would support the Chinese, as would North Korea, perhaps even parts of Africa and some of the Arab states. China, Russia and Korea alone could commit millions to the fight, millions that the West could never match. Any move to declare war would result in a nuclear holocaust and solve all our problems. Massive tsunamis and earthquakes would wipe most of us out immediately, those who were not in ash form already from the nuclear blast. The tsunamis and earthquakes would, in turn, probably knock the Earth off its axis and send it hurling into space – probably straight into the sun, where the last of us who were not ash, drowned or turned into lava sculptures, would die in frozen isolation, and, any who happened to survive that freezing journey – the great and the good elites in their bunkers? – would be turned to ash when we hit the sun, cooked alive in concrete.
Let me say firstly, that I abhor the war in Ukraine. I abhor what is happening in Gaza. However, in both instances, the stand-off could have been avoided. No way was Ukraine ever going to win against Russia, and no way were the Western allies going to go to war to save Ukraine. Same with Gaza, but from a different perspective. It is highly unlikely that the Arab nations will either individually or in union, fight for the Palestinians again, and nor will they open their borders to the Palestinian civilians unless induced to do so by the West; they do not want to invite in Hamas because they know, Israel knows, the Palestinians themselves know, and we certainly know here in the West, that Hamas is threaded throughout the civilian population. Every piece of intelligence points to that being the case, however much we may wish to disconnect Hamas from the Palestinian people.
In both Ukraine and Gaza, terrible atrocities took place against, on the one hand, Russian-speaking civilians, and, on the other, against Jewish civilians. I do not know exactly what happened in Eastern Ukraine, in Odessa, but it is accurate that civilians were burnt to death in a building – about forty of them, women, men and children. A German journalist investigated the incident and many others. Although no Western journalists as such investigated the 7 October Hama atrocity until after the Israelis had removed most of the bodies (they are still finding body parts) and, given the trite homily that truth is the first casualty of war, something terrible happened on 7 October to a large number of innocent Israeli civilians – again, men, women and children. I do not condone either the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and I certainly do not condone the death toll in either place.
Without doubt, Israel is guilty of war crimes, and may eventually stand indicted of ethnic cleansing, but Israel is not listening to anyone, not even the Americans, because what happened was yet another reminder of the Holocaust, however we might feel. The Zionists swore, in 1948, that they would never again allow their people to be massacred by anti Jewish elements anywhere in the world. After the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of thousands of Scots by Edward I’s army at Berwick, we also swore never to let the English massacre us again like sheep to the slaughter and we fought conflict after conflict to maintain that oath. We, as the British, ethnically cleansed and committed genocide against the Tasmanian aboriginals and wiped them out to a man, woman and child – all of them – and displayed their skulls in our museums.
The ICJ might decide otherwise, but I am not convinced that what is happening in Gaza is genocide as laid down by international law. Certainly, undue use of force is present, ethnic cleansing looks likely, too, unless the Israelis allow the Palestinians back into Gaza, and crimes against humanity have been evident. At no time have the Israelis issued orders or made it policy to destroy the Palestinian people albeit they encroach constantly on land which is deemed to be Palestinian by the international community and they ignore UN directives against them. The sticking point is the refusal of every Arab state to recognize Israel, and even to proclaim that they would destroy Israel and scatter the Israelis to the four winds, and, if the intelligence is accurate, Saudi Arabia might well have been the first to acknowledge Israel, via trade and diplomacy, to the chagrin of Iran. We have to look at both sides in this conflict, and it hard not to see Iran’s involvement in Gaza, in Lebanon and in Yemen. That, in no way, justifies the death toll of the Gazans, but, I think, like an individual that has lost his/her head, Israel has lost its head and is inflicting such punishment on the Gazans that they will be terrified to ever rise against Israel in many a long day or to support Hamas again, especially since the Israeli’s have ensured that they know that their leaders are all ensconced in safety, in comfort, opulence, even, in Qatar and other places.
I can see no other solution except a two-state one, but Israel will never accept that solution until the Arab states, including the Palestinians, honour Israeli statehood and independence, and the Palestinians, like the Arab states, must concede the land occupied by the Israeli state. I think Israel might even be willing to concede some of the border settlements again, against the will of some of its most extreme Zionists and Judai-ists if an agreement is reached after the conflict is over. In Ukraine, Zelenskyy is going to have to concede defeat eventually, and, probably, have to give up a large part of Eastern Ukraine as well. Both the Palestinians and the Ukrainians will be rebuilding for many years to come and the West is in no shape itself to rebuild them, albeit it will help – or Russia and China will.