The Trump administration’s attack on the courageous U.N. special rapporteur presages a world without rules, where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, carry out war crimes without restraint.
Francesca Albanese in July 2024. (Esquerda.net/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0)
When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written, one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and the adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur, who today the Trump administration is sanctioning. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on human rights violations that Israel commits against Palestinians.
Albanese, who regularly receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable.
She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” that allows the genocide to continue. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, called “Genocide as colonial erasure,” I have reprinted as an appendix in my latest book, A Genocide Foretold.
She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
She announced that if true, as has been reported, that the former British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to defund and withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, which Cameron and the other former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense for, under the Rome Statute.
The Rome Statute criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted.
She has called on top European Union (EU) officials to face charges of complicity of war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat which was intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies, but a message of humanity.
A woman in Catania, Sicily, waves the flag of Palestine on June 1 as the Gaza Freedom Flotilla’s Madleen departs. (Tan Safi /Freedom Flotilla )
You can see the interview I did with Albanese here.
Her latest report lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.
You can read my article on Albanese’s most recent report here.
Displaced Palestinians receive food during Ramadan in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip on March 1. (UNRWA / Ashraf Amra/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned her support for the ICC, four of whose judges have been sanctioned by the U.S. for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant last year. He criticized Albanese for her efforts to prosecute American or Israeli nationals who sustain the genocide, saying she is unfit for service as a special rapporteur.
Rubio also accused Albanese of having “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.” The sanctions will most likely prevent Albanese from travelling to the U.S. and will freeze any assets she may have in the country.
Rubio delivering remarks at the American Compass gala in Washington on June 3. (State Department/Freddie Everett)
The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint.
It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism.
No one, from now on, will take seriously America’s stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? Americans speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.
“The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass forced displacement and the mass homelessness, while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation — how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asked in an interview I did with her when we discussed her report, “Genocide as colonial erasure.”
The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheidesque existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance, are as familiar to desperate migrants along the Mexican border, or attempting to enter Europe, as they are to Palestinians.
This is what awaits those who Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth.”
Those that defend the oppressed, such as Albanese, will be treated like the oppressed.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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As said by someone who is unfit for service as a U.S. Secretary of State, or as a U.S. Senator. And really unfit for service as a dog-catcher (he is an advocate and apologist for cruelty).
Such contempt, especially for Israel, is well-deserved. And certainly also for many in the U.S. and the West in positions of power or influence. Marco Rubio himself is a thoroughly despicable person and is deserving of nothing but contempt.
“No one, from now on, will take seriously America’s stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights.”
Perhaps the same goes for the UK also.
I’ve yet to meet, or hear about, a single friend, family member or stranger with a pro-Israel stance, let alone anyone not utterly disallusioned with their own political ‘leadership’, namely how quick and easy it was to switch from the semblance of adherence to international law to an outright and almost proud refusal to acknowledge it and, doing so in one of the most vile ways possible.
Those who were once firmly on the fence appear to have climbed down out of shame or sheer disgust.
Everyone has been horrified to say the least; violently shaken awake not only by such wanton and barbarous behaviour by those who, even now, claim to know better, but by the undisguised and eager involvment of supposedly ‘civilised’ Western governments in such bare-faced depravity, including having the actual audacity to try and force their populations to ‘condone or pay the penalty’.
The last several decades were spent rigorously teaching every child the evils of, specifically, genocide and ‘how only the worst criminal minds could ever engage in such an atrocious act’. The same system now demands those millions of educated people readily accept such abject inhumanity if those committing it are constantly declaring: “It’s OK, we’re the Good Guys!”.
Only genuine psychopaths can switch their moral compasses around on a whim to suit their needs like this and I’m convinced almost all of them end up in politics.
“Only genuine psychopaths can switch their moral compasses around on a whim to suit their needs like this and I’m convinced almost all of them end up in politics.”
A fair number of them serve as Voters to elect the ones who end up in Politics. Unfortunately, your description fits the 40% or so of the population who support the Dems no matter what, as well as the 40% or so in the population who support the Repubs no matter what. Anyone who has tried to point out to either a Dem or Repub that their team said just the opposite only recently, but now says the opposite, has experienced this. By and large, about 80% of Americans switch their moral compasses around, not on a whim, but by following orders when the oligarchs that run their team decide to change the slogans. When the noise machines say that Team Blue is changing course, most everyone turns on their heel in unison on the drum beat. Same for Team Red.
““No one, from now on, will take seriously America’s stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights.”
Perhaps the same goes for the UK also.”
Nobody who has read history has ever taken seriously that the UK stands for “democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law, or human rights.” The nation is a monarchy that opposed all three of the major European revolutions for freedom. American, French and Russian revolutionaries all found themselves opposed by Redcoats or the 20th century equivalent. The UK was strongly opposed to democracy in Europe for the entire 19th century. The notion of democracy in either France or America made the English spend themselves deeply into debt trying to strangle it before it could grow. The UK is the nation that does not even have a written constitution, so nobody knows what the Rules are until they get changed to back the Elites, as they always do, which is a bizarre form of a ‘rule of law’. Ask an Irish about the UK’s commitment to Human Rights? Maybe mention “Bloody Sunday”? Even today, His Majesty’s Government firmly refuses to hear about British civil rights violations from Ireland to Afghanistan to Iraq.
Albanese is the one who should have a Nobel Peace Prize; how to nominate her –
hxxps://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/nobel-peace-prize/nomination/criteria-for-nominators
Surely there is someone, no doubt more than one, out here who can do it
Let’s do it!
Good idea. Someone who meets the criteria must have the integrity for this. Thanks for the link.
When the “criteria” page does not just say “member of the human race”, then you start to understand that this is a crooked thing from the person who invented Dynamite. It should be called the Dynamite Peace Prize, which might point to its absurdity. Perhaps the trophy can be a bundle of dynamite with wires and detonators. All in gold of course.
Reality has said that the main criteria for actually receiving the prize is to be an opponent of an enemy of the USA and Israel. If you oppose the Russian or Iranian government, start working on your acceptance speech that you will give to the room full of rich people in tuxedos and evening gowns who will gather to honor the guy who got rich by inventing dynamite for a violent and non-peaceful world.
Rev Hedges states
“Americans speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.”
Ah yes, while far too many Christian Zionists do take their comfort in the rationale of the Scofield Bible, an edition which has evidence of a well-known (ill-renown?) European family banking dynasty’s financing at the turn of the 20th century, I do take some small exception, and a negligible comfort in knowing so many of us as Americans yet feel the prick of conscience that reminds us daily in this doom-laden dystopia we have come to inhabit that we are bearing witness to a horror, “THE” horror of our times. And ask over and over: “To what end?” For we do not follow nor heed America’s leaders in their mental infections that have them pursuing and condoning such grotesque and perverted policies.
Those of us alive and sentient in this hour feel much more than a minor jab of remorse, I know I am and sorely wounded bearing the scars of having to look at myself for my own actions that were never enough, so it goes in each’s soul-reflecting mirror with a more profound gaze, a much more critical one than perhaps ever before. I see myself guilty. Of weariness, a full lifetime of observing the plight of Palestine in a shadow where the light of hope once shone through. The fact our federal leaders have been so stridently opposite of humane and worthy of Rev Hedges’ written opprobrium as damning and daunting and makes me ashamed to be a citizen of this nation as my individual conscience is represented to the world by these poseurs in faux-Zionist righteousness, and they’ve exposed their brutishness as committed-so and fully out of their closets, leaving no doubt as to their murderous choices so irrevocably made.
“Murder most foul!”
I can only conclude that what they see in their mirrors while being prepped and “made-up” for the cameras as actors in this greatest of morality plays are faces I relish not seeing in my own place of reflection. And I further wonder if they see a reflection at all if and when they gaze therein. Could it be their mirrors are painted black as their hearts? Or perhaps old legends of vampires are pertinent here?
The entire construct does have an aura of the darkest of the supernatural within its confines after all…
Rev. Hedges would do well to show how closely Francesca Albanese
speaks with Christian power revealing Rubio/US to be in “spiritual death” (MLK):
“Jesus answered him, ‘If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the
wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me’ ” (Jn.18.23).
Let’s face it, Israel can get away with just about whatever it wants.
1.) Most Americans — bc of the lock the Zionists have on our mainstream discourse — are still essentially none the wiser.
2.) The Zionist power configuration has effectively shut down all college dissent around this issue. Pieces of excrement like Ackman have even threatened future employment for the young indebted activists!
3.) Palantir, NVIDIA, etc. have an impending full on surveillance state/police state with the capability to monitor us and squelch any criticisms of Israel.
NVIDIA? Palantir I get, but NVIDIA? NVIDIA makes chips. Good chips. So good that when something like crypto or AI comes along, everyone goes and buys the best chips which are NVIDIA. But, NVIDIA does not create the apps. Unlike most of the Magnificent 7 stocks, I have not seen many links to genocide from NVIDIA, which is different from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others from the Dem Mega-Donors Club.
And, you missed DOGE Musk. Social Media was always ground zero of the surveillance state, and has been for over a decade. When DOGE bought all the Twits, he also got all the records of the monitoring of the users. Plus all the info that the little birds with tracking code that got onto other websites sent home. Plus, now he likely just got access to much of the Social Security and IRS data. All it would take would be one employee more loyal to DOGE than to their country or to their people to hit an “upload” button in the middle of the night, and all of that got added to Musk’s already impressive databases.