International law

In 1980 in his State of the Union address President Jimmy Carter said: “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Dear President Donald Trump: We’ve been here before and it’s as ludicrous this time as it was nearly 40 years ago. Why on earth are you sending in a flotilla of ships and 2,500 troops? Why are you so convinced that the mines that exploded on two oil tankers, neither of which were American, in the Persian Gulf are the work of the Iranians? The Persian Gulf, and in particular the infamous Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway (21 miles wide, the same as the English Channel) that is its entrance, is no longer the “jugular”...

By Jonathan Cook June 3, 2019 By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province - their final holdout in Syria - should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism. That the US and other western governments enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible. Originally published on Counter Punch.org on May 29th, 2019 here Scepticism was all the more warranted from the media given that no physical evidence has yet been produced to corroborate the jihadists’ claims. And the media should have been warier still given that the Syrian government was already poised to defeat these al-Qaeda groups without resort to chemical weapons — and without provoking the predictable ire (yet again) of the west. But most of all scepticism was required because these latest claims arrive just as we...

Islamophobia can be said to refer to the way Islam is being alienated in society by other cultures through fear and distrust against people belonging to the Islamic faith. Muslims are often portrayed in an increasingly negative context as witnessed in media, legislation and public debates. By Idriss Jazairy June 1, 2019 Islam is often presented as an ‘isolated culture’ with its own distinct features, which are allegedly incompatible with certain values upheld in Western societies. It is the rise of such a polarizing context that results in growing fear against Muslims, prejudice of other cultures and the ‘us versus them’ paradigm. Originally published human-wrongs-watch.net Although Arabs are a Semitic people like the Jews themselves, the media know that anti-Semitism is banned for the latter but tolerated for the former in the name of freedom of expression. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US by individuals – who were...

I suppose it is of interest that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have found something to agree about – the criminal indictment of Julian Assange.  Trump is acutely vulnerable to the exposure of truth and Clinton blames her electoral defeat in 2016 partly on what WikiLeaks disclosed about her improper use of a government computer to send private emails. Such are the perverse ways of the deeply unjust. The liberal media is not happy with this indictment, although it also wants to distance itself from justifications for Assange’s claims of journalistic privilege, viewing him as a lone wolf with rogue traits. There are solemn assessments evaluating the narrowly framed government indictment charging cyber-crime, that is, publishing illicitly obtained classified documents from a digital source, apparently an apolitical everyday occurrence for government employees. What is apparently at legal issue is deciding whether or not Assange should be protected by reference to...

M. K. Gandhi on democracy The jaws of power “The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.” John Adams, (1735-1826) According to the Nuremberg Principles, the citizens of a country have aresponsibility for the crimes that their governments commit. But to preventthese crimes, the people need to have some knowledge of what is going on. Indeed, democracy cannot function at all without this knowledge, What are we to think when governments make every effort to keep their actions secret from their own citizens? We can only conclude that although they may call themselves democracies, such governments are in fact oligarchies or dictatorships. At the end of World War I, it was realized that secret treaties had been responsible for its outbreak, and an effort was made to ensure that diplomacy would...

By Chas Freeman, Jr. February 20, 2019 Remarks to the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University St. Petersburg, Florida, 12 February 2019 I’m here at your kind invitation to discuss China, how bad our relations with it may get, and how the contest we’ve initiated with China is likely to play out.  Let me take a minute or two to set the context for this discussion. The context Five hundred years ago this month, Hernán Cortés began the European annihilation of the Mayan, Aztec, and other indigenous civilizations in the Western Hemisphere.  Six months later, in August 1519, Magellan [Fernão de Magalhães] launched his circumnavigation of the globe.  For five centuries thereafter, a series of Western powers – Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and, finally, the United States – overturned...

A conversation with Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif The Western mainstream press hasn’t done much to enlighten their audiences to the plain fact that there is more than one side to a conflict between at least two. The Transnational is happy to make available some other views, particularly since Iran is the David and the West the Goliath and since omission is more effective in propaganda terms than fake. Iran’s views, its history, its reasons to do what it does and see the world as it does is woefully under-represented in the said press. So is leading media’s criticism of US policies vis-a-vis Iran. They systematically take the side of the strong, the bully and the war-threatening side of the conflict. If the Munich Security Conference has no other merits, it does offer an opportunity to hear many voices and here them from their own representatives and not through Western...

“Working for a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind by Promoting International Cooperation and Multilateralism” By Yang Jiechi February 18, 2019 MUNICH, Germany, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) – Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, delivered China’s keynote speech on February 16, 2019 at the 55th Munich Security Conference. Italics added by The Transnational for pedagogical, easier-read reasons. This is the English translated version of the speech reprinted from China Org. cn here: Mr. Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my great pleasure to join you at this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC). As a global forum on security policy, the MSC provides an important platform for people around the world to express views and share insights on major issues concerning world...

Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70. All reason to celebrate. Without the norms embedded in this extremely important document, humankind would be much worse off. Because normativity is important even though it is only words. It enables us to make those who violate human rights accountable. And that is, in general terms, an extremely important aspect of the UN and its Charter. So too the norm expressed in its Article 1 – that peace shall be established by peaceful means and only when all such means have been tried an found in vain, can the UN member states take to violent means. As a last resort. That said, the only two problems I have with the human rights philosophy and concept are: One could also formulate it this way: Human beings have duties vis-a-vis those whose rights are not embedded in any declaration, i.e. other living creatures,...

  “We need jaw jaw not war war”, said Winston Churchill rather hypocritically. Still, he would be glad to see that the number of wars around the world has fallen dramatically since the end of World War 2, despite the wars in Korea, Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan versus India, Central America, Cyprus, ex-Yugoslavia, Syria and now Yemen. Compared with centuries past this has been a remarkable era, yet one not often acknowledged. Interstate wars, apart from India versus Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, have vanished off the map. The wars that remain are civil wars. The democracies do not go to war with each other, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher long ago observed. According to a detailed study made by the Economist last month, analyzed all international wars since 1900, along with the belligerents’ wealth and degree of development. It counted all conflicts in which at...

  Finally, finally, the over-long, ten year trials of the leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge leadership of Cambodia, are over. The two defendants, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan, were each given a life sentence at the end of the first trial in August 2015 for crimes against humanity. Now last week they were convicted of genocide. Of the other three that were tried, one, the ex-foreign minister, Ieng Sary died in 2013, one, Ieng Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary, was too ill with Alzheimer’s to appear and one, Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), voluntarily confessed three years ago and was sent to jail for 35 years. In the twentieth century, two massacres of hundreds of thousands people compete for second place after Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, Poles, homosexuals and gypsies. One is Cambodia and the other is Rwanda. But Cambodia, where the deaths were between a million and...

    Hiding Israel’s Crimes of State behind false claims of victimization I along with many others am being victimized these days. They are being labelled anti-Semites, and in some instances, self-hating Jews as well. This is a Zionist and Israeli effort to shut down our voices and punish our non-violent activism, with special venom directed at the BDS Campaign (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) because it has become so effective in recent years. This negative branding of the opposition is being called ‘the new anti-Semitism.’ The old anti-Semitism was simply hatred of Jews as expressed through negative images and attitudes, as well as discriminatory practices, persecution, and vigilante violence. The new anti-Semitism is a criticism of Israel and Zionism, and it has been endorsed by governments friendly to Israel and pushed by a variety of prominent Jewish organizations, including some associated with Holocaust survivors and memories. Emmanuel Macron, President of...