The Lead

They Are Destroying the Very Fabric of International Law

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Apr. 03, 2024

April 3, 2024 (EIRNS)—In opening remarks to her weekly Dialogue webcast on April 3 , Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned of the twin dangers of the world careening towards nuclear war, and of the intentional destruction of international law itself, which is one of the last remaining bulwarks to that war.

“I’m not in a position to say how close we are [to world war], but we are very close. Because both of these so-called regional crises, in Southwest Asia and in Ukraine, have the immediate potential of escalation—intentional or not.… I think what is most worrisome, something which has appeared both with respect to the United States and Israel, and that is the apparent and obvious disregard for international law. And I think the most ominous and most glaring example is the U.S. responding to these resolutions and decisions by the UN Security Council, with the argument that they regard them as `non-binding.”

Zepp-LaRouche explained: “The UN Security Council is actually the highest institution of international lawfulness.… If that is being disregarded as `non-binding,’ then we are really in for trouble—because that means that there is no international institution that can be appealed to, and we are entering a complete state of jungle lawlessness.”

Consider the pattern in the latest developments in the Ukraine and Southwest Asia war theaters: deadly escalations of those wars, combined with the intentional dismantling of the last vestiges of international law by the combined actions of the U.S., the U.K. and Israel in particular.

• Israel’s April 1 rocket attack which destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 12 people, now threatens to widen the war in Southwest Asia greatly—Israel is now reportedly on high alert, expecting Iranian retaliation. “By striking a consular building, Israel has now in effect bombed Iranian soil,” the London Economist admitted—a total violation of international law. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari brushed aside criticism and justified the attack: “This is no consulate and this is no embassy. This is a military building of Quds forces disguised as a civilian building in Damascus.”

• On April 1, the IDF targeted and destroyed a World Central Kitchen aid convoy in Gaza, killing seven people—likewise a violation of international law. Nearly all humanitarian aid operations in Gaza are now suspended—evidently Israel’s goal in the first place. Netanyahu’s response was essentially: “Oops, sorry. These things happen in war.” White House spokesman John Kirby tried to whitewash the incident and the entirety of Israel’s conduct in Gaza: “The State Department has a process in place. And to date … they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.”

• Back on Jan. 26 of this year, immediately after the ICJ ordered Israel to stop actions plausibly characterized as genocide, the U.S. cut off all funding for UNRWA, the leading humanitarian aid agency for Palestinians. They did this scarcely hours after the Israel government announced they had just “discovered” that 12 UNRWA workers allegedly had links to Hamas. Retired British diplomat Craig Murray stated on April 2 that, as a former British ambassador he knows what is required to reach such a decision, which is minimally a week of proposals, consultations and cabinet discussions. “These Western countries have been planning this genocide for months, if not years.… We are seeing the collapse of the fabric of international law,” Murray charged.

• On April 3, TASS reported that the Russian Prosecutor General’s office had formally requested the United States, Germany, France and Cyprus provide information about Western countries’ potential involvement in the March 22 terror attack in Moscow that left 144 dead. This follows the measured March 26 statement by FSB head Alexander Bortnikov that Russia had reason to believe that the United States, the United Kingdom and Ukraine were all behind the hitmen who executed the terror attack. Will those governments meet their international treaty obligations to help combat terrorism—or do they have something to hide? Recall that, immediately after the 9/11 attack on the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Bush and offered his full cooperation.

The broader implications of today’s strategic crisis come into focus by recalling Lyndon LaRouche’s analysis of that 9/11 attack, barely three months after the event occurred. In a December 23, 2001 article, “Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th,” LaRouche wrote that:

“The investigation must therefore approach the evidence from what should be an obvious flank. It must be based on what should be the elementary realization, that a military coup-attempt of such a type, could not be motivated, unless it had a plausible intention, an intention existing outside, and beyond the scope of the coup-attempt as such. The possibility of the existence of such an attempted coup, depends upon the prior existence of an intended sequel of the coup attempt, such as that of signaling the unleashing of some prepared continuing action. Therefore, for competent counterintelligence specialists, the first question posed by the bare facts of the attacks on New York and Washington, was: What was that continuing action waiting to be unleashed by the successful effect of those attacks?”

LaRouche continued: “The purpose of the attempted coup, was to force the U.S.A. to support the current government of the Israeli Defense Forces, in pushing the U.S.A. into supporting a Zbigniew Brzezinski-style `Clash of Civilizations’ type of global religious-war scenario. The authorship of that grand-strategic, geopolitical intent, was already well known to leading European officials, and others. That `Clash of Civilizations’ scenario, had been made notorious by the combination of former U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski and his ever-handy `Leporello,’ Samuel P. Huntington.”

The requisite action back then was essentially the same as it is today. “I can only ask you, get your behind off the couch!” Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated in conclusion of her April 3 webcast. “That may sound, you know, a little bit not so polite; but I really mean it. Because this is the most dangerous moment we ever had. If things go wrong, we may not exist. The danger of nuclear war is a very real one, and we have to change policy because the present Establishments obviously have caught some strange bug in their brain which hinders their thinking. So, we need you to get active with us, because it is more urgent than ever before.”