{"id":146759,"date":"2024-12-21T13:55:11","date_gmt":"2024-12-21T20:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=146759"},"modified":"2024-12-21T13:55:11","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T20:55:11","slug":"us-double-standards-only-our-enemies-commit-war-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2024\/12\/21\/us-double-standards-only-our-enemies-commit-war-crimes\/","title":{"rendered":"US Double Standards: Only our enemies commit war crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Connor Echols<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

A half-baked report highlights the double standard US officials use for Israel<\/strong>
May 13, 2024<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On NBC\u2019s Meet the Press Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken struck back at claims that U.S. officials let Israel dodge American laws regarding weapons transfers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t have double standards,\u201d Blinken said<\/a>. We treat Israel, one of our closest allies and partners, just as we would treat any other country, including in assessing something like international humanitarian law and its compliance with that law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily for observers, Blinken has left a substantial public record against which one can test this claim. His own department\u2019s statements and actions undercut this supposed impartiality. Indeed, all available evidence indicates<\/a> that U.S. officials hold Israel to a lower standard than just about any other country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take the State Department\u2019s long-awaited report<\/a> on Israel\u2019s compliance with international law in Gaza, which came out late last week. The administration found that Israel had likely used U.S. weapons to commit war crimes but said there wasn\u2019t enough evidence to draw clear conclusions about specific incidents. The upshot is that, from the Biden administration\u2019s perspective, there is no legal reason to cut off U.S. arms transfers to Israel at this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Blinken\u2019s telling, any more forceful conclusions would have been impossible given the incredibly complex military environment\u201d in Gaza. It\u2019s very, very difficult in the heat of war to make a definitive assessment about any individual incident,\u201d he said Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that very, very difficult\u201d operating environment didn\u2019t stop the State Department from drawing strong conclusions about Hamas\u2019 actions in the very same report. In a three-page defense of Israel\u2019s campaign \u2014 a feature not present in similar reports on other states \u2014 U.S. officials found with great clarity that Hamas uses human shields, intentionally targets civilians, and consistently violates\u201d the laws of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Observers are left to conclude that the U.S. has somehow attained more definitive inside information about Hamas than Israel, one of America\u2019s closest military partners. This is in part why an independent panel<\/a> of legal experts and former officials said the report was at best incomplete, and at worst intentionally misleading in defense of acts and behaviors that likely violate international humanitarian law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once again, the Biden Administration has stared the facts in the face \u2014 and then pulled the curtains shut,\u201d the panel, which includes two former senior officials at the State Department, wrote in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notably, Blinken\u2019s \u2018fog-of-war\u2019 standard only appears to apply to Israel. In other contexts, the U.S. does not find it difficult at all to assess violations of international law,\u201d Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch, told reporters Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yager pointed to the case of Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, about which it took Blinken less than a month to announce that war crimes had been committed by Putin\u2019s forces.\u201d Based on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia\u2019s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine,\u201d he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, Blinken has even accused<\/a> Russia of ongoing<\/em> war crimes in Ukraine, suggesting that he\u2019s capable of making such determinations on the fly. Russian forces and officials have committed \u2013 and continue to commit \u2013 war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine,\u201d he said in early 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The standard also doesn\u2019t seem to apply to the warring factions in Sudan. Seven months after the start of a brutal civil war in that country, Blinken declared<\/a> that both sides have committed war crimes\u201d in the latest conflict, a conclusion he based on the State Department\u2019s careful analysis of the law and available facts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the cases of Sudan and Russia, the State Department leaned heavily on reports from NGOs and human rights advocates, who conducted key investigations of alleged crimes. As it happens, those very same organizations have<\/a> repeatedly<\/a> found<\/a> that Israel is<\/a> violating<\/a> international law in its campaign<\/a> in Gaza, but Blinken has apparently chosen to ignore their conclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the [report] says is that it\u2019s very difficult in these circumstances where security partners are engaged in armed conflict for the United States to assess violations of international law,\u201d Yager said. We know it\u2019s difficult because we did that work, and we presented the evidence to the U.S. government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* Connor Echols is the managing editor of the Nonzero Newsletter and a former reporter for Responsible Statecraft. Echols received his bachelor\u2019s degree from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism and Middle East and North African Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers  in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Connor Echols A half-baked report highlights the double standard US officials use for IsraelMay 13, 2024 On NBC\u2019s Meet the Press Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken struck back at claims that U.S. officials let Israel dodge American laws regarding weapons transfers. We don\u2019t have double standards,\u201d Blinken said. We treat Israel, one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}