America’s Rights

The United States, in its capacity as ruler of the world, has established bases everywhere and launches raids on anywhere else. It retains the exclusive right to cross oceans, seas and deserts in order to wage war on “terrorism;” it alone has the right to define “terrorism” and differentiate it from operations of “self-defense,” such as the one which Israel undertook against “terrorist” Arab and Palestinian children and shepherds in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

The United States alone is allowed to announce that it has bombed a group deemed “terrorists” and then, when it becomes clear that it has bombed a wedding party, it concludes the matter by saying “sorry for the inconvenience.” It doesn’t rely on local capabilities of any state, but relegates them to deputy status and sends its own planes to appropriate that state’s skies; battleships to sail its seas; spies to violate its sons’ private lives and observe their political factions, their blood types, pulse-beats, shoe sizes. By night America can cite 50 studies about human rights and public freedoms; by day it pounces on Wall Street and rains pepper spray and batons onto protesters, deeming them no more important than empty onion skins.

America alone has the right to certify “terrorism” and “good conduct;” it grants legitimacy to regimes, traffic regulations and civil defense, numbers of ministries, the amount of salt in a salad. America alone gives Israel “smart bombs” and the idiotic Patriot missile and lends cover to Isreal’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity” — even though a quarter of a century has passed since this ambiguity was effectively collapsed due to a media shock that reported Israel possesses 200 nuclear warheads, by Mordechai Vanunu’s reckoning. America alone retains the right to evaluate its performance regarding detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the dozens of secret CIA prisons in Europe. It turns a blind eye, time and time again, to the systematic repression of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention centers.

The United States acknowledges that it uses pilot-less planes from Ethiopia within the framework of its campaign to combat terrorism on the African continent, but tries to diminish the concern surrounding this acknowledgment and attitude by removing the planes in an operation that had no one convinced but the people who fabricated it — just as the spokesman for the Department of Defense “clarified”, in contradiction to other officials’ statements, that the planes were not armed and did not launch raids, but rather “observed.” All our lives we’ve heard that “curiosity killed the cat,” but everything is subject to being updated and now it is people who die as America watches — and we always have to believe America. It is proud of its unprecedented operational capabilities, and its pilot-less planes’ capabilities to closely observe ants crawling on an empty residence, we don’t doubt. And when these planes kill a mother, and her children, and shepherds, and the guests at a wedding, and the White House explains that what happened was “a mistake,” we have to believe that too. The leaders of the states which face aerial appropriation have to be convinced and must not demand an international criminal investigation, nor even a halt to these fatal raids.

Heads of states which are supposed to be “allies” of the United States have the right to feel uneasy about an “ally” who, in front of their own people, coerces them into conducting bombing raids. The casualties run into the hundreds, and such raids conclude with a passing acknowledgement that it was a “mistake,” with solicited apologies more shameful than the sins.

People cannot pass over the murder of a mother and her children as happened in Afghanistan. They cannot reach the shore of “forgetting” a crime of this magnitude by crossing a bridge of “apology.” All regimes that murder innocent people and attach no importance to humans and their souls are criminal, existing outside history, civilization and humanity, whatever the armor it wears.