Western leaders have for some time taken it upon themselves to extra-judicially murder their enemies’ leaders. Israel has a well-known targeted assassination policy. In most cases it quite openly announces that it is responsible for the targeted killing of their enemies’ leaders particularly when the killing occurs in their enemy’s territory. Just one example of this was the killing of the 67-year old blind and wheelchair bound spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was murdered by the Israelis in March 2004. At other times, usually when the killing takes place in a third country, the killing is undertaken covertly and is usually not admitted to. An example in this case was the killing of another Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was killed by being drugged and electrocuted in his hotel room in Dubai in January 2010 by people who Dubai police say was Israeli Mossad agents.
Since the so-called ‘killing’ of Osama bin Laden less than two weeks ago, the Israeli Zionists allies in the US, the neoconservatives, have attempted to legitimise such killings arguing such killings are justified since the death of a non-combatant leader may well prevent the deaths of innocent people or the deaths of ones own combatants. However, if that is the case, then there seems to be no reason at all why such an argument cannot be used by either side. Why, for example, should Jihadists not kill senior US or Western military personnel or even political leaders in order to, say, put an end to the operation of US terror drones that kill many innocent people throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Why would it not, by the exact same argument that the neocons use, be legitimate for a covert Jihadist assassination group operating in the US to murder by bombing a CIA drone operator who lives with his wife and family in Washington, DC? And would it not be legitimate, however unfortunate, that the drone operators family also happened to die in the resultant explosion as often happens when either the US or Israel carry out a targeted killing?
Why is the world blind to see where all this is going? Killing will become a free-for-all and who knows who might then become ‘legitimate targets’.
Does the world really want to go to a place where any nation who feels self-righteous enough can simply murder his enemy by virtue of their own ideological legitimacy? Where will it end?
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.
1 comment:
seems fair so ok by me.
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