Government friends of genocide’s refusal to condemn array of Israeli war crimes leaves even tiny token gesture legally vulnerable
Keir Starmer’s and David Lammy’s fearfulness and complicity in Israel’s genocide have left even their feeble token gesture of suspending a tiny fraction of licences for UK arms exports to Israel facing legal challenge from pro-Israel lawyers.
Lammy and his boss had made a show of announcing the suspension of arms licences representing only eight percent of the total, claiming that the weapons in question were at risk(!) of being used in war crimes. But UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a group that forced a London hospital to remove a display of art by Palestinian children and tried to make Tower Hamlets council to order the removal of Palestinian flags put up by residents, has announced that it is to make a legal challenge to the ban because of the utter spinelessness of the way in which the Red Tory team did it.
UKLFI says it will apply for a judicial review of the suspension on the sick grounds that the government claims it is doing so because Israel is not allowing enough aid into Gaza – it is imposing famine – and because Israel is ‘allegedly’ abusing – in reality it torturing – Palestinian prisoners. But neither of those clear war crimes require the
important components which go into military aircraft including fighter aircraft, helicopters and drones, as well as items which facilitate ground targeting
that Lammy said he was suspending.
UKLFI openly uses lawfare to try to serve Israel’s interests – its operations director said in 2016 that the group exists to
[stand] for Israel, and doing that as effectively as we possibly can.
It tried recently – and failed – to have British-Palestinian surgeon struck off the medical register because of his support for Palestine, quoting social media posts that he either did not make or said had been mistranslated, a common tactic of the Zionist right and their allies against supporters of Palestinian human rights.
But in this case, their point stands up: Starmer and Lammy have stubbornly refused ever to state the obvious and call Israel’s daily bombing of schools, hospitals, homes, ambulances and aid workers, and its months-long mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, the war crimes that they undoubtedly are. By not giving that incontrovertible justification as the basis for the full arms ban that international law requires, they have left their spineless, inhumane gesture so wide open to legal challenge that a truck loaded with deadly missiles could be driven through it.
Perhaps intentionally, given their support for Israel’s genocide so far.
Ironically, this may well mean that Starmer’s government will be in court arguing both why they should be banning arms to Israel and should not be banning arms to Israel, because as lawyer Naks Bilal pointed out the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) is trying to force the government to fulfil its obligations under international law and to stop equipping the genocidal occupation regime entirely:
An utter betrayal by Starmer and Lammy that is rightly making them look weak and idiotic – but is costing the lives of innocents with every day that it continues.
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I suspect that Lammy’s negligible suspension of some arms licences to Israel is all-show to maintain the pretence that Labour under Starmer is unchanged from Labour-of-old, the Labour of Peace, Socialism and Democracy.
It therefore follows that said LFI objections and threats by their lawyers (UKLFI) to apply for a judicial review of the suspension is all-show also.
They’d literally flog a dead horse, then complain about the whip they’d been supplied with not having enough thongs on it.
Pricks.
Five more years of this level of ineptitude and malevolent incompetence, and the Country will be making a banana republic look like an attractive option to aspire to.
Meanwhile, evidence is emerging that suggests that the near-abolition of the Winter Fuel Allowance was planned before the general election.
This quote is from Andrew Rawnsley’s column in yesterday’s Observer.
“It is only since the election that it has been clocked that a commitment to protect the payment, made in the four previous Labour manifestos, was absent from the one put to the country this summer.”
Comparing costs:
Winter Fuel Allowance: £1.5 billion a year
Open ended commitment to support Zelenskyy ‘for as long as it takes’: £3 billion a year.
Go figure!
Great, and deeply disturbing article from Declassified UK:
https://www.declassifieduk.org/lets-just-fight-how-britain-prefers-war-over-peace-in-ukraine/
The British elite and the country’s Establishment has been rabidly Russiaphobic since around the 1830’s.
As detailed in John Howes Gleeson’s 1950 study “The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion.”
https://academic.oup.com/psq/article-abstract/66/4/618/7251604
Whilst a lot is made of concerns at the time concerning speculation of Russian intent towards pushing the British out of India, the leading and pivotal role played by Russia in defeating the French during the Napoleonic Wars will not have helped given the British elites historical and unwarranted high opinion of itself as being the superior of all other peoples on the planet.*
It must have rankled like hell to see the Grande Armie’s back broken and the Russians entering Paris (just as it also rankled some 130 years later with the German Army and the Russians entering Berlin) rather than the English elites getting all the glory and kudus. Not to mention the assistance given to the Union side by Russia in the US civil war against a British backed Confederacy.
As experience has long demonstrated, the only way to deal with such a rabid dog and its obsession is to put it down. And that particular rabid dog is well overdue in that respect.
*An observation which goes back at least to the comment of the Venetian ambassador to England, Andrea Tervisano, circa 1500 “The English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them; they think there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England.”
Thank you for this.
There is no going back, they can’t bullshit or bomb their way out of a Genocide