NEWS

RADICAL EVIL

WAR AND HYPOCRISY

Shortly after  the German air attack on Coventry in the beginning of the Second World War, the Commander of the Royal Airforce asked Prime Minister Winston Churchill what targets to aim at in retaliation.  Churchill’s answer was: right to the center of a German city. What the allies did to the German cities thereafter was exactly what the Germans had done to the cities of Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and other cities. Many German cities thereafter were destroyed by the allied air raids  as were Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

The new international legal order with the United Organization  as its guarantee was meant to help prevent such destructive warfare . or war altogether. New rules of international law and of humanitarian international law were written for that purpose. Unity among the five major postwar powers – permanent members of the Security Council – was the political ( and shaky) foundation for respecting the new legal order. That political foundation crumbled completely when Putin’s Russia started its war of aggression against Ukraine. Sadly thereafter, every reference to the UN made post-war legal order has lost much sense.

Condemning only Israel for violating the rules of international law made after the Second World War, is at best hypocrisy, at worst reviving anti-Semitism.

We Europeans ought to realize that the Third World War fought currently in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Israel, Iran, Ukraine and as Cyberwar is far worse than violations of International Law, developed after the Second World War. What the warring parties – except the Ukraine – have in common is the disfranchisement of the adversary. The adversary is denied any legal status, any human dignity, and thus dehumanized to an object to be destroyed with all available means. It has turned Gaza into an exterminationcamp.