2024: Year in Review

A year of genocide by Israel during which the West lost all credibility in principle and morality.

Published: 2024-12-30

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In the beginning …

2024 began with people pleading with world institutions, governments, and for those who have faith, with their religious organisations to end the suffering of the Palestinian people. For we were suffering with the Palestinian people, re-witnessing the brutality of the daily massacres of children by the Armed Forces of Israel. It was a form of psychological torture which could not be endured.

Humanity had surely learned from the global terror of World War II. The United Nations was created, a forum equipped with a Security Council and the International Court of Justice, to prevent or at least rapidly stop horrors of this scale.

The Security council's capacity to act was repeatedly anulled by the United States of America using its veto to allow Israel to continue its evil. The International Court of Justice accepted a case [192] from the Republic of South Africa against the state of Israel under the first international human rights treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. On January 26th the court issued preliminary measures prohibiting Israel from [further] acts contravening the convention to which it was signatory. Later, the court reaffirmed that the Occupied Palestinian Territories are Palestinian.

And yet, 2024 is about to end with the genocide still being executed by citizens of the state of Israel. Every single day of 2024, more children were assassinated by rifles, drones and bombs made in America and used by Israeli soldiers to kill the people they had confined. Or those children died of thirst or malnutrition due to Israel's aid blockade and destruction of water purification facilities. Israel's purpose is unequivocally clear: to eradicate from Gaza Palestinian humanity. This is not ethnic "cleansing". It is ethnic erasure. Genocide.

This year of evil is not the fault of one leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Israel's War Cabinet. Every soldier is responsible. Opinion surveys have regularly shown support for the targeted killing of Palestinians at over two thirds of the Jewish population of Israel. They are also responsible, immorally complicit in the genocide.

The state of Israel has marked itself with the indelible stain of the most grotesque and persistent, ethno-supremacist racial hatred. As Lady Macbeth lamented, such a moral stain cannot be washed away.

What was politely referred to as the "Palestinian Problem" can no longer be swept under the rug. The Israeli phrase no longer hides the problem. The problem is Zionism. It is not limited to the state of Israel.

The government of the United States of America has funded, armed and fueled the genocide executed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of Gaza for its entirety, which spans the entirety of the ghastly year of 2024. The US abused its veto power in the United Nations Security Council while Anthony Blinken, its Secretary of State, made trips to the region participating in a pantomime of discussions labeled "negotiations" while Israel assassinated the negotiators meant to be sitting on other side of the table. Self-declared Zionist Blinken’s public statements did not include condemnation of Israel’s assassinations.

Greater Israel

On April 1st Israel attacked Iran's diplomatic mission in Damascus Syria with missiles. Israel murdered diplomatic staff and guests. Israel violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Laws of War at once. Blinken's response then would be echoed again and again later in the year calling for de-escalation and calm. He did not repudiate Israel.

This contrasted with his statements when Iran responded to the attack on its citizens and territory (a diplomatic mission is the territory of the occupying nation). Blinken strongly condemned Iran's provoked response. Blinken’s repeated diplomatic statements revealed Israel's impunity provided by the US while the US was funding, arming and politically supporting Israel's genocide and warring in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Israel had been attacking Syria since the US fomented the Syrian Dirty War from 2013 onwards. In 2024, after starting the next war with Lebanon after 2006, Israel invaded Syria while supporting extremist Salafist forces to overthrow President al Assad. This completed 6 of the "7 nations in 5 years" agenda of which US General Wesley Clarke had informed Amy Goodman back in 2006, of which Clark had learned at the Pentagon days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

2024 saw the Zionists achieve a geographical expansion of their Greater Israel project both in annexing parts of Palestine in Gaza and further into Syria from the Golan heights to Mount Hermon.

The Zionists oppression of Palestinian Arabs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank continued in parallel with their crime-of-crimes in Gaza.

Ukraine

The project by US Cold Warriors and other Russophobes on both sides of the Atlantic, to "weaken Russia" by inducing a proxy war in Ukraine between Russia and NATO, continued its inexorable failure.

The "spring,summer,whenever" telegraphed assault by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) onto the Surovikin defensive lines built by Russia and the 4 former Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk (comprising the Donbas) and Zaporozhye and Kherson was a disaster. It cost in excess of 200 000 Ukrainian men and much of the military material supplied by NATO nations to Ukraine. It left the AFU rather than Russia weakened.

During 2024, Ukraine's fortunes plummeted. It began with the rout of Avdiivka in southern Donetsk. This allowed the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (AFRF) to advance considerably westwards to the outskirts of the key logistics city of Pokrovsk.

From the south, the AFRF captured the strategic town of Vugledar. From there the AFRF advanced northward. It also advanced south westward from its advance past Avdiivka to Pokrovsk. These combined advances captured large swaths of southern Donetsk. The latter part of 2024 saw the greatest territorial gains by Russia since the earliest days of the conflict.

The core understanding of Russia's strategy in the conflict was provided to the English speaking world in April when Jacques Baud, a Swiss military intelligence officer who had worked with NATO and studied Russian military history and strategy, joined several English discussion shows, beginning with The Duran. Russia is still following its strategy of a war of attrition. The AFRF's recent territorial advances are a product of that strategy. The AFU is short of everything: men, armaments and morale. The AFRF is not. Yet, the AFRF continues to exhibit caution to minimize casualties. There is no guarantee that the conflict in Ukraine is the only one in which it will be required to engage due to consistent provocation from a belligerent US led West.

Following the rout of Avdiivka, to counter repeated attacks by Ukraine on housing complexes and other civilian infrastructure in Belgorod, the AFRF invaded two salients in the north of the Ukrainian oblast of Kharkiv. The secondary benefit was to draw AFU forces away from the Donbas.

Later, the AFU executed a British plan to invade Russia within its 1991 borders in its Kursk oblast. Poor border defence by Russia, learned from NATO surveillance, was exploited by the AFU allowing the initial 10 000+ strong invasion force into Russia. Russia rapidly withdrew its citizenry to remove civilian casualties and built rear defensive lines.

A discussed objective of the invasion was the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant as a nuclear blackmail/bargaining chip. The AFU, augmented with thousands of foreign fighters, failed to reach this objective. A second hypothetical objective was to hold Russian territory, again to use as a bargaining chip. This proposed objective made no sense as Russia would never bargain for its territory, but forcefully remove the invaders. The effect was a training exercise for NATO command, an extension of the war consistent with every US led NATO effort to foment the conflict and prevent negotiations to end it.

Russia’s removal of the invaders is still under way, with the AFU and other foreign forces having been in retreat for months. This has not stopped the West from issuing propaganda of “North Korean” soldiers fighting in Kursk to justify even further escalation via firing British (Storm Shadow) or US (ATACMS) missiles into Russia.

The AFU used both cached military assets and many of its most trained and experienced soldiers for the Kursk invasion, which contributed to Russia's dramatic advances in the Donbas, both in southern Donetsk and westwards from Lugansk into the Ukrainian oblast of Kharkiv up to the Oskol river and its north-south reservoirs.

At year's end, the AFRF controls all of Lugansk and the territory in Kharkiv east of the Oskol river. A triangle of territory in northwestern Donetsk remains under the control of the AFU. It has limited logistics supply, and is vulnerable because of this. It is also, however, highly urbanized which will eat into the 5:1 ratio of casualties to the AFRF's advantage if it wishes to capture this area by force. Zaporozhye remains split on an east-west line with its like named capital remaining under AFU control. However, the AFRF's advances in southern Donetsk will allow the AFRF to continue advancing westward through southern Dnipropetrovsk into Zaporozhye north of its defensive line. Kherson remains divided at the Dnieper river.

The primary differences between the opposing forces are all to Russia's advantage. It has more soldiers and the ability to recruit more at will with thousands of volunteered soldiers completing their 6 to 12 months of training each month. Ukraine has no sizable population from which to recruit. Dropping the recruitment age to 18 will not help. The 18 to 25 year demographic is a thin in Ukraine. NATO has drained its stockpiles to a minimum. Russia's military production continues to provide for the AFRF.

Financially, the Russian economy is overheating. Its central bank has raised interest rates to over 18% to combat inflation. Ukraine is indebted to its supporters. It has no functioning economy beyond distribution of funds gifted to it and the corruption which is endemic to its culture.

The Sahel

The inversion of the French geopolitical entity, the G5 Sahel, into a mutual security organisation, the Alliance of Sahel States, continued in 2024. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger consolidated their alliance against French and US colonial control. Late in the year their eastern neighbour Chad began its process of rejecting the colonialists.

The Sahel is one of the areas of contention in the changing global geopolitical map. Chinese development money and Russian security forces are replacing the US and French.

Julian Assange

The British judiciary finally applied a sense of the law following years of abuse of the publisher by US hired lawyers or UK courts. To avoid losing the extradition case the US settled the matter by offering Assange a plea deal which Assange accepted, pleading guilty of journalism. Assange's legal team negotiated for the plea to be offered in the closest US court to his nation of birth, Australia, to which he returned immediately after pleading.

After only two months of convalescence in the arms of his family, Assange returned to Europe at the invitation of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on October 1st. The committee restated their understanding of the immoral and illegal abuse which Assange had faced from the US for 15 years. This represented not only an attack on journalism but one on political expression and free speech.

His crime had been exposing the illegality, duplicity and war crimes of the Empire.

Observations and Revelations

2024 has revealed that the US as the leader of the "West" has no morality at all wielding its power. The application of its 2008 doctrine of using proxy forces for its geopolitical wars has been repeatedly confirmed. The 2011 NATO no-fly zone intervention in Libya which Queen-of-Warmongers Clinton summarized as "we came, we saw, he died" was bookended with the final overthrow of Syria's al Assad with religious fanatics largely from central Asia. In between, the 2014 coup in Ukraine using ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Nazi-ideologues opened the door for the CIA to swoop into the country and facilitate the civil war in the Donbas which started a few months after the coup. US bio-research of a potentially military nature (bioweapons) was offshored to Ukraine to the concern of the Russian General responsible for defence against them, and other illegal indiscriminante weaponry.

Accusations of China running a genocide against the Uyghur population of Xinjiang based on fabricated accusations by a German Christian zealot appeared in 2021. These were preparatory operations for an insurgency in the critical trade gateway region which hosts key infrastructure for China's BRI mega-project. China is well aware of the CIA's telegraphed operations and the role Uyghur mercenaries have played in the Syrian Dirty War and the overthrow of al Assad.

The US overthrew Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2022 because he became too close to Russia and by extension China. As a second warning to India, and to disrupt China's efforts to continue its trade network in the Bay of Bengal, the US overthrew the government of Bangladesh in 2024, India’s eastern rather than western neighbout.

Just preceding the BRICS Heads of States meeting in Russia in the city of Kazan, China and India announced that they had resolved to settle their border issues. This removed another playground for foreign meddling. The discussions in Kazan were primarily about a financial architecture to avoid that used by the West to impose sanctions and steal central bank assets.

During 2024 Britain began using its Terror laws to persecute journalists who were reporting on the horrors in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. These journalists were accused of expressing support for organisations designated by the state as "terrorists". Journalists like Jonathan Cook documented the logic breaking back-flips which establishment media publications needed to bend themselves into navigating the contours of Arab "independence movements" from US/UK/Israeli labeled "terrorists" while religious fanatics overthrew the government in Syria and Israel assassinated political leaders and murdered tens of thousands of civilians.

The operational components of the West's utilization of proxy forces to sow chaos and destabilize governments have always been its "Intelligence Services". 2024 saw the first public meeting of the leaders of the CIA and MI-6 declaring their partnership and their support for their "friends in Kiev" who had been running assassinations and militant operations targeting Russian civilians, like the Crocus Hall massacre. The overthrow of Assad in Syria was a combined operation by the "Foreign Intelligence" services of the US, UK, Turkey and Israel with support from Ukraine using Syrian and central Asian proxy fanatics to leave the nation which had been under US sanctions for a decade vulnerable to factional revenge violence.

Honorable mentions

A most knowledgeable and calm commentator on international affairs has chosen to add his pleasant voice to live video commentaries during 2024. Former senior US diplomat, Ambassador Chas Freeman, can be heard in his weekly appearances in the back catalogues of Judging Freedom, or the longer and more expansive Dialogue Works. If one can devote but 1 hour a week to geopolitics interviews, I would recommend Nima's weekly interview with Freeman.

Two of the most sane voices in the European parliament, the Irish MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace did not achieve their quotas for re-election. It has been a pleasure assisting in disseminating their voices of warning and sense.

The year began with news of the passing of Australia's greatest deceased journalist, John Pilger. He had lauded the efforts of Julian Assange, who revitalized journalism with Wikileaks. Pilger would be proud of the continued quality of reporting in independent outlets, despite the persecution these journalists are receiving from Western governments. These hypocritically proclaim the importance of independent journalism in a democratic society while attacking the journalists who are doing their job of holding power to account.

The first journalist abused by the UK with its Terror laws was Craig Murray who had exposed the CIA's extraordinary rendition program (kidnapping and torture to generate confessions to support the Global War on/of Terror) when he learned of it as UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan in the early 2000's. He became a good friend of Assange and staunch supporter of Wikileaks. For this he was targeted, eventually serving time in a Scottish prison for exposing the political witch-hunt of Scottish Independence advocate and elected representative Alex Salmond.

In 2024, Murray was elected by the Board of Consortium News to fill the vacancy on it left by Pilger’s death. Murray promptly traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to report on Israel's war on the state and its citizens.

Newsletter

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Sources

Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Press releases of proceedings, ICJ, 2023-12-29 onwards

The Rout of [the AFU in] Avdiivka, YesXorNo, 2024-02-23

The Slaughter of Vugledar: Ukraine and NATO's Fate, YesXorNo, 2024-10-09

Jacques Baud on the Russian Art of War, YesXorNo, 2024-04-03

[US] NATO v Russia: 2014 - 2024, YesXorNo, 2024-03-09

Assange: Welcome Home, YesXorNo, 2024-06-26

Assange: The Transnational Threat to Speech, YesXorNo, 2024-10-02

The Sahel: A Trifecta of US Self-Coups, YesXorNo, 2024-05-13

Daly and Wallace: April/May and Ep 168., YesXorNo, 2024-05-20

US/NATO Invades Russia as a Training Exercise, YesXorNo, 2024-08-16

The Assassination of Lt. Gen. Kirillov, Bioweapons and Revenge, YesXorNo, 2024-12-22

BRICS: The Kazan Declaration, YesXorNo, 2024-10-24

Chaos and Lies, YesXorNo, 2024-12-11

Dethroning the Reserve Currency, YesXorNo, 2024-08-27

CI-6 Take Center Stage as NATO Bows Out, YesXorNo, 2024-09-10

Crocus Hall: Ukraine's GUR/SBU Are Allowed to Execute an Incompetent Operation and Russian Civilians, at once, YesXorNo, 2024-03-26

Bantustan 2.0, YesXorNo, 2024-12-18

You Shine On, Pilger, YesXorNo, 2023-12-31

Craig Murray Takes John Pilger's Seat on CN Board, Consortium News, 2024-11-01

John Pilger: Afflictor of the Powerful, Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 2024-12-29

A Palestinian Year in Review: Genocide, Resistance and Unanswered Questions, Ramzy Baroud, Antiwar, 2025-01-03

Culture

Galaxy Song - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Monty Python, Monty Python, 2008-11-13

Speech on 9/14/01, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Barbara Lee’s Youtube channel, uploaded on 2007-02-15 made in US Congress on 2001-09-14

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