Western terror’s flags of convenience

Jun 25, 2014, Finian Cunningham

In recent weeks, five Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli forces, nearly 400 others arrested and whole towns in the occupied West Bank have been put under lockdown. The pretext for this renewed Israeli state terror campaign on the Palestinian people is the apparent abduction of three Jewish teenagers. The whereabouts of the Israeli youths is unknown. It is feared that they may have already been killed and the Israeli regime knows this.

But that has not stopped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from unleashing military assaults on the whole Palestinian population – with the silent complicity of Western governments. This is a grossly disproportionate use of violence as collective punishment against civilians by the Israelis – a crime against humanity. But the Israelis are getting away with this cynical opportunity to militarize and subjugate the Palestinian people even more under the guise of “rescuing teenagers.”

This deception has echoes of the mass abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria last month. No sooner had the shadowy insurgent group Boko Haram – which is linked to Saudi finance and therefore Western intelligence – kidnapped a group of over 200 teenage girls in northern Nigeria when Western governments were rushing to send Special Forces into the West African country to supposedly track down the culprits. Incongruously, Israel’s Netanyahu was also foremost in offering Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan the “benefit” of his military forces.

Just like the case of the missing Israeli teenagers, a “flag of convenience” involving an emotive cover story is found for the purpose of furthering a geopolitical agenda – either the remilitarization of Palestinian territory and the smashing up of the nascent unity government between Hamas and Fatah, or the infiltration of resource-rich West Africa with Western military forces.

Another flag of convenience this week was the Israeli ground and air assault on Syrian territory from the illegally occupied Golan Heights. Israeli forces effectively committed an act of war on a sovereign state – yet again – after a “teenage Israeli boy” was killed by a rocket allegedly fired from Syrian army positions. The young victim was named as Muhammad Karaka, aged 12, originally from Galilee, according to the Israeli publication Debkafile.

Debkafile goes on to reveal the real purpose of the disproportionate criminal response from the Israeli forces – “a boost for the rebel bid for Quneitra.”

For the past two months, the southwestern Syrian town of Quneitra has been the scene of a standoff battle between the Syrian army and anti-government insurgents. The insurgents are mainly linked to the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra Front, according to political analyst Christof Lehmann. The Nusra Front has at times been involved in deadly turf wars with the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But both these organizations are united by their core Wahhabi extremist ideology, Saudi and Qatari financing, and covert military support from Washington and its allies, including Britain, France and Israel. The other unifying bond between al-Nusra and ISIS is their purpose of terrorizing Syria into regime change for Western geopolitical objectives.

Thus a flag of convenience of a dead Muslim boy whose family lives under Israeli occupation (cynically described as an ‘Israeli teenager’) allows the Israeli military to attack a sovereign country for the aim of furthering a Western-backed covert war of aggression that involves the deployment of al-Qaeda-linked terror networks. In case we need reminding, the al-Qaeda-linked “Islamic extremists” are supposed to be what the whole Western so-called War on Terror of invading foreign countries, like Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan ongoing, is all about.

That brings us to the current ISIS insurgency in Iraq. From nowhere, it seems, this group is threatening to overthrow an entire country in a matter of days, which has prompted the US to interpolate itself again in a territory that it destroyed under a nine-year criminal war of occupation. US Secretary of State John Kerry was in Baghdad this week vowing “sustained, intense support” to the Iraqi government to defeat ISIS. Some 300 American military advisors are to be dispatched to Iraq, and there are plans for US assassination drones and air strikes to be deployed.

Yet, recent reports confirm what several others have already established: that Washington and its NATO allies, along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel, have been training, funding and directing the ISIS mercenaries from secret bases in Jordan and Turkey over the past three years.

American-sponsored ISIS is threatening Iraq (after recently being thwarted in the regime-change operation in neighboring Syria) and now America is supposedly falling over itself to “help” Iraq fight this same group. Again, this is a ludicrous flag of convenience to hide the ulterior objective of Washington returning to meddle in Iraq and the region, which the Americans have already destroyed many times over with their criminal imperialistic predations.

This same predatory imperialism is at work in Ukraine, where the US and its NATO allies have been stoking a civil war in order to destabilize Russia. The Western-installed fascist regime in Kiev is murdering civilians in the south and east of the country – despite a nominal “ceasefire” being declared this week. This regime is getting away with mass murder because of Washington’s sponsorship and yet Washington is blaming Moscow for “inciting the violence.” If this violence that Washington is fuelling does not stop, then the Americans and their servile European allies will slap more economic sanctions on Russia. How’s that for brazen self-fulfilling logic?

From Palestine to Syria, Nigeria to Iraq and to Ukraine, a veritable armada of false flags are at full mast. The Western mainstream media, of course, “report” each case separately and at superficial face value, according to the desired pretext and purpose of their governments.

But taken together and properly understood, there can be no doubt that the flags represent one banner: Western state terrorism.