Amnesty International is calling for an arms embargo on Israel and Palestine. The blog post is getting some very heated comments. (Read all about it here.) The charge is that both sides are actually committing war crimes by knowingly killing civilians and that the weapons used in these murders are imported. Largely from the United States, on one side.
Like most people I know, I have a very very limited understanding of what the hell is always going on at Gaze. The fact is that, as Americans, we get lied to all the time from our alleged channels of truth and information, i.e., the media. The only way we can know what’s happening (aside from being there) is to study reports like AI’s. While, certainly, no report is 100% impartial, I wouldn’t take anything that either side says at face value. And I don’t think there are a lot of truth-seeking people in this country who believe that what we’re told on TV is really what happens and happened. I don’t.
But we’re the United States. We’ll sell anything to anybody willing to pay for it, no matter what it is and what they do with it. Religious pundits say it all the time, and we ignore them for some of the actually crazy things they also say. We’re the nation of the dollar, and no one’s going to stand for being told who they can sell their bombs to. I mean, come one, we’re not telling them what to do with it. They might use it in a “just war” one day, and we’ll be on the sides of the good guys. Right?
Our trade “rights” are more important than human rights, no?
I mean, the United States is nothing without a free market, right? Without unfettered greed, I mean, capitalism, we have nothing to offer the world, right? No other ideals or art or sports or culture? So let us do our business and sell whatever we want to people who just might use our products to kill families on purpose, but, you know, we don’t know nuthin bout dat.
Unless, of course, it’s a little Communist island called Cuba. We won’t sell them anything. Free markets mean nothing there.