The world has now reached a position where state-sanctioned targeted assassination has become the norm for dealing with enemies and others that offend them. Gone, it seems, is the necessity for International Criminal Courts and the like as nation-states take the law into their own hands.
Government officials and functionaries have now become judges, juries and executioners who have taken it upon themselves to bypass national and international laws and ignore the fundamental principles of justice which are the cornerstone of civilized and moral society. Governments have now succumbed to resorting to acts of savage revenge and have thrown justice and the rule of law to the wind. They have lowered themselves to the standards of those they accuse of being without morals.
Both Israel and the United States, two nations that profess to be the beacons of democracy and justice, now use targeted assassination as a tool to fulfill both their military and political objectives. Since the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden last Monday, the lust for blood by targeted assassination has reached boiling point.
Israeli MK Shaul Mofaz yesterday called for the assassination of Hamas leaders in the Gaza. Neoconservatives in America are also calling for the assassination of Hamas people in the “Gaza, Damascus, Oslo, or Dubai, wherever they may be”. For these neocons, anyone they regard as ‘terrorists’ “deserve death” by virtue of targeted assassination.
Israel has been practicing targeted assassinations for years and the US has certainly been covertly practicing it for as long and openly discussing it since 9/11. Until recently, however, the media has invariably brushed it under the carpet. Most people knew that it was happening but, while they may have tut-tutted it, said little against it. Now, though, it is openly practiced and the ‘bringing the frog slowly to the boil’ analogy seems to be appropriate.
Terror drones are already ranging the skies over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. In Afghanistan and Pakistan they are being used to kill targets without consideration to the civilians they kill in the process. It’s not hard to imagine the next step for the Israelis and the Americans to take. Israel has already used targeted assassinations against political enemies as well as military targets. How long will it be before the US begins to use targeted assassinations against their political enemies at home or elsewhere in the West?
AUSTRALIANS AT WAR
THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.
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