Here’s to Human Rights Group DAWN

 

 Today’s accolades go to the human rights group DAWN. The group is sponsoring five Palestinians in a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department for violating a U.S. statute called the Leahy Law.

Passed in 1997, the Leahy law prohibits the United States “from funding foreign military units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations.”

Charles Blaha is a former State Department official responsible for implementing the Leahy Law. According to “Democracy Now,” Blaha

“ says there is a mountain of evidence of Israel carrying out torture, extrajudicial killings, rape, enforced disappearances and other abuses.”

The case, then, should be a slam-dunk for the plaintiffs.

Rather incredibly, though, the State Department, under the war-friendly eye of Antony Blinken, claims to have looked into the matter and found no wrongdoing by its customers in the Israeli military. Really – nothing there.

Incidentally, we would like to write about other things. But the US/Israel operation in Gaza is so depraved and relentless that it seems wrong to let it become just another forgotten story.

Speaking of relentless, in the past 24 hours U.S, bombs killed 38 more Palestinians and wounded 200 others. That's a fairly average night in Gaza for the last fourteen months or so. Night after night, it goes on.

There’s a reason, by the way, that Israel mainly bombs civilians at night. As longtime observer Vijay says, it’s because that's the time when:

they are able to strike total fear in the population by killing entire families in their homes and thereby threatening other families with annihilation.