Opinion, reporting by Mathew Carr

Jan. 26, 2024 — On the night of 31 August, 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms seized the Gleiwitz train station on the German-Poland border and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (Wikipedia).

 The operation, part of a wider deception, was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of Polish anti-German saboteurs. It was designed to help justify the beginning of World War II and it worked.

On 1 September, the day following the Gleiwitz attack, Germany launched Fall Weiss (Case White), the strategic plan for the invasion of Poland, which precipitated the war. Hitler cited the border incidents in a speech the same day as justification for his invasion. He’d told his generals on 22 August, “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli (event used to justify war). Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth”.

Yet, he was not the victor of WWII. And the world couldn’t get him to answer for the truth because he committed suicide before they got the chance.

In 2024, there is compelling evidence that Israel has deceived the International Court of Justice in arguing against accusations by South Africa of genocide in the Gaza strip.

Later today, we expect to get the ICJ’s first murmerings on the case. Will it order Israel to stop the violence. Will Israel listen?

Without being able to blame Hamas for its actions, Israel has no real case.

No matter whether history shows that the terrible Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were a legitimate or false-flag excuse for the brutality, the inescapable truth for Israel is that it did, indeed, play a big role in creating Hamas and it didn’t adequately tell the court about that.

It admitted it publicly…15 years ago. Here is the Intercept’s story from 2018.

In the second world war, about 6 million Jewish folk infamously died.

The horrendous circumstances of those deaths were laid out in the Pulitzer prize winning cartoon-book called Maus, where Art Spiegelman depicts Nazis as cats, Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs.

“They are all terrifyingly human,” The Times wrote of the comic’s characters.

Snip: Maus

Never again, was the subsequent mantra…signalling that humanity does actually matter.

Yet, it seems the mantra applies only if someone ELSE moves toward that level of death and maiming. Israel seems to think its rein of terror is justified.

Deception has come to be used as a normalised strategy not just in war, but across business and politics …and, yes, even in the judiciary, where it definitely shouldn’t be accepted.

The ICJ has little real power right now to require Israel to act (according to multiple reports I’ve read), but what it SAYS later today just might still be influential on all parties involved in the surprisingly awful and probably deceptive behavior.

For the court, calling out the deception is a good place to start.

(more to come)

NOTES

Weirdly this graffiti appeared near my house, portraying a mouse (I think), cat and dog.