In Washington, some of the same “terrorists” who are bad enough to justify Israel’s land grab in Syria are considered good enough to run a U.S. puppet regime, says Caitlin Johnstone.
U.S. State Department Spokesman Matt Miller with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel in October. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
The U.S. government is simultaneously (A) justifying Israel’s land grab in Syria by saying the nation has been taken over by terrorists, and (B) talking about removing those same forces from its list of designated terrorist organizations.
The people running the U.S. podium have pivoted seamlessly from celebrating the liberation of the Syrian people in the removal of President Bashar al-Assad to citing the fact that the nation is now overrun with terrorist factions in defense of Israel’s rapid move to militarily occupy large swathes of Syrian land while hammering Syria with hundreds of airstrikes.
At a Monday press conference, State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller said these moves by Israel “are temporary to defend its borders” and that Assad’s ouster “potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel and would threaten civilians inside Israel.”
“Every country has the right to take action against terrorist organizations,” Miller added.
US Government: It is great and wonderful that the dictator Assad has been deposed and the people of Syria have been freed!
Press gallery: Do you oppose Israel grabbing Syrian land?
US government: No way man, don't you know Syria's just been taken over by a bunch of terrorists? pic.twitter.com/zfilinDn4L
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 10, 2024
During a Tuesday press conference Miller further clarified the U.S. position on Israel’s land grab, saying,
“What precipitated their move into the buffer zone was the withdrawal of the Syrian armed forces, which, as I said yesterday, creates potentially a vacuum that could be filled by any one of the numerous terrorist organizations that continue to operate inside Syria that have sworn to the destruction of the state of Israel.”
During the same Tuesday press conference Miller also stated that “there is no legal barrier to us speaking to a designated terrorist group” such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, the group which led the run on Damascus whose leader has been an official in both ISIS and al-Qaeda.
And as it happens the U.S. government has now taken a sudden interest in removing HTS from its listing as a designated terrorist organization, with Politico reporting that there is now “a furious debate playing out in Washington” as to whether or not the group should be removed from the list immediately. Somehow I doubt the debate is actually all that “furious”.
So according to one narrative Syria has been liberated by brave freedom fighters and that’s wonderful, but according to another concurrent narrative Israel obviously needs to invade Syria because the nation has just been taken over by evil terrorists, and by yet another concurrent narrative those evil terrorists aren’t evil terrorists anymore because they’re going to be running a U.S. puppet regime.
These are the kinds of contradictions you run into when your policies are guided by the blind pursuit of planetary domination instead of by truth and morality.
US Considering Removing HTS From Terror List After Syria Takeover
US officials say they're in contact with the al-Qaeda-linked group
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Syria #HTS #AlQaeda #BasharAlAssad #AbuMohammedAlJulani https://t.co/ddZoePMsim pic.twitter.com/IBr0H0xDyr— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) December 9, 2024
In reality, “terrorist organization” is a political designation, not a behavioral one. It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the U.S. empire.
Pick any group of non-state actors who fight against the U.S. and its allies and you’ll find them on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hamas. Hezbollah. They’ll even put official state militaries on there like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
They used to list the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist faction back when the U.S. was expanding its global military presence under the banner of the “war on terror,” but they were removed from this listing at the tail end of the Trump administration because the Uyghur Islamist group was fighting Assad in Syria and could prove useful in the empire’s Cold War aggressions against China.
Even now the U.S. House of Representatives is moving to ban the U.S. government from using the statistics of Gaza’s Health Ministry to calculate deaths from Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the enclave on the basis that the ministry is run by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. They need to do this because the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll is considered so reliable that the U.S. State Department has been using those stats in their own reports.
The group that is committing the genocide necessitating such analysis is of course not a designated terrorist organization.
This is because the label “terrorist organization” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control. In empire language it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them.” If they are determined to no longer be disobedient then they no longer need bombs dropped on them, so they are no longer considered terrorists.
You can kill all the civilians you want using whatever methods you want without being considered a terrorist organization, so long as you are a friend of the U.S. empire.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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