As usual, Secretary of State John Kerry got off on the wrong foot at his press conference in Geneva yesterday, where he announced a US/EU/Russia/Ukraine agreement to lower tensions in eastern Ukraine. In fact he again put his foot in his mouth.
After ignoring the real neo-Nazis who have infected the US-backed post-coup government in Kiev like an ebola virus, Kerry began his press conference yesterday denouncing the anti-coup protesters in the east as the real Nazis, citing an inflammatory document purportedly demanding that the Jews in the restive Donetsk region register as such with local authorities and pay a fee for the privilege.
Citing this document, an incensed John Kerry roared that:
…this is not just intolerable; it’s grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable. And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities, from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of, there is no place for that. And unanimously, every party today joined in this condemnation of that kind of behavior.
There is only one problem. The whole thing was such an obvious fraud that the claim was debunked almost immediately. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the ADL, the National Conference Supporting Jews, the New Republic, and even the Ukrainian official whose signature was purportedly on the document itself all declared in no uncertain terms that the whole thing was a total fraud.
The fliers were handed out by mysterious masked men lurking around synagogues, which might have been an early sign that the whole thing was a cook-up. It was a grotesque provocation meant to divert attention from the ugly reality that Washington’s regime-change foot soldiers in Kiev, in their wolfsangel get-ups, are an embarrassment but seemingly ignored by Kerry. To Washington, real neo-Nazis are invisible if they are partners, fake ones are a great threat if adversaries.
To get an omelet you have to break a few eggs, of course, but claiming night is day and black is white is a bridge too far. How is it possible that Kerry would fall for such a crude forgery and what does it retrospectively say to his claim that the US government possessed evidence that the Syrian government was behind the sarin gas attack last summer? Particularly now, as Seymour Hersh has blown the lid off of US claims. Are they that gullible or are they the authors of the frauds?
At the Geneva press conference Kerry announced that the OSCE would be the go-to organization for monitoring the four-party agreement on Ukraine, which should be a signal to those having any experience with the organization that this should not be taken very seriously. The OSCE is the place where failed US and EU politicians go to collect large salaries and sample exotic foreign cultures while still feeling important lording over the poor locals in the benighted country of the day.
OSCE election monitors are so useless and lazy they often write the election reports before the voting has even taken place, as this writer observed monitoring the presidential election in Belarus in 2006. Verdict first, trial later.
John Kerry said much about how all illegal groups must disarm, about how Russia should expect more sanctions if it could not put down the protests in eastern Ukraine, how order must be restored in the east.
But what did Kerry not say?
He did not say that the Ukrainian government should immediately stop using the military against its own people. In fact he praised the Ukrainian government even as it sent in the military against the Ukrainian people, citing its “extraordinary patience and fortitude in the face of enormous challenges and pressure.”
This is very odd because the use of military against citizens has more often than not been the pretext for either US active regime-change operations or a direct US attack. The one recent exception was Egypt, where the US-backed coup government used its military to kill thousands who protested in favor of the elected president. The parallels are obvious.
But in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere, the US war cry has always been that the government is “using its military against its citizens” and has therefore lost its credibility. President Obama explained in his March 28, 2011 speech explaining his decision to attack Libya:
Faced with this opposition, Qaddafi began attacking his people… I made it clear that Qaddafi had lost the confidence of his people and the legitimacy to lead, and I said that he needed to step down from power.
Shortly after his Geneva speech yesterday, Kerry’s State Department tweeted a picture of the Secretary of State with the quote:
We agreed all illegal armed groups must be disarmed, all illegally seized buildings must be returned to their legitimate owners, and all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.
But if this is actually the demand, would this not mean that every action taken by the US-backed insurgents in Kiev should be reversed? Or are these actions only undemocratic when the unelected groups that the US opposes undertake them?
Once again the double-talk and hypocrisy comes to signify US diplomacy. That and endless “Tweets.”
