David Halpin considers the life and crimes of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair whose blood-stained imprints continue to wrack the lives of innocent Palestinians and Iraqis.
The paramount war criminal used more tons of aviation fuel flying to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington 10 days ago. The CFR sounds like one of the more benign “think” tanks among the hundreds out there. On its board sits Mrs “The Price is Worth It” Albright and General Plutonium Powell. The gist of the speech given by the envoy for the Quartet was two fold.
Firstly the natives in the ineptly named West Bank (the west side of the Jordan Valley having been robbed from them) have been pacified in Jenin by Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces. The quisling nature of these forces, who were trained by the CIA in Jericho and Jordan, escaped mention of course. So too did the fact that these forces often go for Palestinian "targets" provided by Israel. Ord Wingate trained the "special night squads" in the 1930s and they included trainee Zionist terrorists. The brutal methods spawned by the British mandate have bore fruiting bodies in Israel. Now, the PA has taken the bloodied baton. A phalanx of pick-ups with armed thugs in balaclavas beats the family door down in the early hours. The family sobs in the street whilst the furniture is destroyed and a son is snatched for “interrogation”. Thus is Jenin pacified and it becomes Blair's exemplar for a new “state” which has to provide security as its first duty. That security comes down the barrel of a gun and through the local “Abu Ghraib”, from whence the tortured corpse of Sheikh Barghouti was carried in February of this year. “The Israelis have been able to step back,” says the envoy. “On to this can be grafted economic and social progress.”
Secondly, the modern Middle East Messiah implores Barack Obama to step straight into the “peace process” and not to do an Annapolis half way through his term. And he spoke of building from the bottom up. That is natural for him, given that he has helped bomb Fallujah flat. His Zionist masters have done the same with D9s and high explosive in Rafah and the West Bank – over 100,000 homes since 1948. Ms Kim Ghattas, a customary safe pair of hands, broadcast this on the BBC flagship propaganda programme “Today” without question or context from herself. She did not tell those listeners that the torment of the Palestinian was greater than ever or that the 15 per cent of mandate Palestine in which they live is occupied in every inch by the Zionist entity.
Blair's oration can be read at the “Office of Tony Blair”. To extract some meaning is a trial. There are nods to Palestinian suffering but the essence is the continued building of a massive judenraat – “trusties” from within the ranks for the West Bank prisons. Another battalion comes soon. As now, they would be under the nominal control of the PA but directed from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Speed is of the essence because the quisling Mahmoud Abbas is a busted flush and the Palestinian pressure cooker is hissing. The simplicity and duplicity of his “analysis” is shown by this:- ''So they [the Israelis] leave Gaza. In their eyes, they end ‘the occupation’. They take 8000 settlers with them. They get Hamas and rocket attacks in return.'' There is no Summer Rains (multiple attacks on Gaza with a panoply of lethal weapons in 2006) or of Operation Hot Winter unleashed on 28 February this year where 120 humans were killed in three days, over 50 being children. Blair “does not do detail” (Ms Clare Short) but the first need is to be conscientious.
He might not realize that Israel has never negotiated in good faith. They want the lot and loathe the Arabs. Corralled in ghettoes and behind the haha of the wall, they are largely out of sight and certainly out of mind. They just need to disappear, to melt into those capacious Arab states. The metaphor of Dr Mustafa Barghouti comes to mind: ”There are two men sitting at a table negotiating how the pie between them should be divided. The Israeli is eating the pie as he talks.” Blair has been the jester who has distracted the Palestinian negotiator, for what he is worth, whilst “settlers” armed by Israel persecute the native population. He might have left the American Colony Hotel, and stayed with a Palestinian family in the old city of Khalil, or Hebron. He would have seen the bullets fly and the temples of the family set alight. From the luxury of the American Colony, he could have seen Sheikh Jarrah where a tent was pitched on levelled ground. The Al-Kurd refugee family had been pressed to leave the house they had occupied since 1956. There had been six years of legal wrangling and then their house was seized whilst the sick father was in hospital and the mother, Fawziyyah, was out. He might have gone with his minders to the protest tent and shown solidarity with the now bereaved mother and with justice. The move would have been widely publicized and would have restored a little faith in international justice.
Blair's erstwhile neighbour, “General” Gordon Brown (as promoted to this rank by the Daily Mail), is managing to squeeze out even greater hypocrisies. “The prime minister … expressed his disgust and horror at the Taleban's 'cowardly use of a child,” the BBC reported. He did not use these words for the slaughter and maiming of thousands upon thousands of women and children by the coalition of the willing. The son of the manse is tuned to Africa and says: “Mugabe’s failed state is no longer willing or capable of protecting its people. Thousands are stricken with cholera, and must be helped urgently.”
Do Blair or Brown know the cholera vibrio was put to work for the empire? The British internment camps of the second Boer War were the first to target a nation's women and children. Foul water and bad sanitation did their deadly work on 20,000. But we forget or never knew. British youth is fed “The Sun Never Sets on The British Empire” but not on “The Blood Never Dried” (John Newsinger). The duo have no knowledge of the massacre of the Matabele by Mugabe early in his orbit. The British High Commission and Foreign Office kept quiet. Blair took over the Major government's genocidal sanctions policy for Iraq in 1997. Whilst the well mannered man from Brixton sought his fortune with the Carlyle Group, the New Labour high command worked with their opposite numbers in starving a well developed country back to the Stone age. The chlorine factory near Fallujah was bombed in Gulf War I. Spare parts for water and sewage pumps were barred, as was penicillin. The cholera vibrio was soon draining the life fluids from the children who were made easier targets by malnutrition. At least 500,000 children died over the 12 years from this very deliberate policy, many from diarrhoeal disease. UN officials Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday resigned in protest, and Halliday called it genocide. The vibrio has been killing again in Iraq for 18 months. In 1991 89 per cent of the population had clean water. A barbarian force applied the sanctions to a civilian population and followed with massive explosive force from 22 March 2003. The broken sewers and foul water belong neither to Saddam Hussein nor to Mugabe but to the two good Christians Bush and Blair.
There has been a drive by the state broadcasting service, the BBC, in these last days to promote Blair, the Christian-Catholic. The “Today” programme had two courtiers speaking of his motivation and beliefs. One was a hack, Matthew D'Ancona, and the other Lance Price. The former studied medieval confession, which might come in handy, and the latter was “media adviser” to Blair and the “Labour” party. Price concluded it was moral conviction, and not religious belief, which drove his former master to join with Bush in the destruction of Iraq. Blair has preached on “faith” and “globalization” in Westminster Abbey, the hub of British Catholicism. He speaks of globalization i.e. global capitalism, as a benevolent policy and not a rapacious one. Just one human casualty is here. He later joined the Catholic church of St Peter and smiled with the Holy Father in the Vatican garden. It is said that Blair will have confessed his infinite litany of sins to one prelate or another. Priestly stamina was needed for that list and a nip or two of Irish whisky. If he received absolution, then, in the belief of the Catholic church, all his terrible sins in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere are washed away. A nation which posed no threat whatsoever to this island nation lies in ruins but:
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat; et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis (suspensionis) et interdicti in quantum possum et tu indiges. [making the Sign of the Cross:] Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi, merita Beatæ Mariæ Virginis et omnium sanctorum, quidquid boni feceris vel Mali sustinueris sint tibi in remissionem peccatorum, augmentum gratiæ et præmium vitæ æternæ.
or
May our Lord Jesus Christ absolve you; and by His authority I absolve you from every bond of excommunication and interdict, so far as my power allows and your needs require. [making the Sign of the Cross:] Thereupon, I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
What is the nature of this Houdini? Is he corrigible? Will he cleanse the blood and bind the wounds of those thousands his weapons have maimed and gouged? Will he be penitent henceforth until his grave?
On 5 December in Canada, ''Tony Blair and Belinda Stronach join together to support Faith Acts Fellowship.'' [sic] The vacuity of the title fitted with the chasms of principle. Does this man look contrite? Is he weighed down with a million dead in Iraq (equating to 3 million in the UK), four million refugees and at least two million maimed? This zealot feels no such weight. He is a psychopath. Simply put, he has an abnormal response to the loss or suffering in others. He is joined in this most dangerous defect of the personality by those in his “sofa” cabinet that connived for war and the Zio-cons/neo-cons whose bloodlust knew no bounds. There are many more.
If the world is to draw back from the abyss over which are poised the weapons of a silent eternity, these creatures must be brought immediately before an international court. They are to be tried with all rigour of the law, unlike Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein or, currently, Tariq Aziz. Those many psychopaths waiting in the wings will be checked at least when smiling killers or cold liars are taken down below.
”The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” – Plato
I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.” – Pinter
One victim of this Satanic coalition can be seen here, but beware the images. The burning of the trunk and the incineration of the hands and forearms was caused by the most intense thermal radiation – weapon unknown. Pictures of Ali Abbas and many more will be on the walls of the cells for these Satanic men until they leave.
*David Halpin FRCS is a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon. He founded the Dove and the Dolphin charity, one of whose aims is to promote the health and welfare of Palestinian children.
