Robert Inlakesh
THE United States, the EU, and the UK have collapsed the post-WWII order in defense of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. Instead of even providing the veneer of a free and democratic public debate, they have weaponized their power in the economic, political, and media spheres against dissenters.
The decision of the US Trump administration to implement sanctions against UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese represents the birth of a new era in international politics. The timing of the move itself was no mistake. It came after the UN representative’s report, which detailed the extent to which Western corporations are sustaining the Israeli settler colonial system of oppression.
Albanese addressed the public in a press conference following the release of her 39-page report, where she called out the performative actions taken by some states, which have been limited to punishing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She compared it to theater, asserting that the world should stop pretending as if the crimes are limited to the settlements.
The UN Special Rapporteur posed the question of whether it would have been rational to claim that the problem with Apartheid South Africa was simply the Bantustans, pointing out how ridiculous it would be to apply targeted sanctions only against activities in those areas instead of against the state that was behind all the policies of racial injustice.
Now, the US has come after Albanese with its crushing sanctions, which it uses against any actor it dislikes, now including employees of the United Nations itself.
But it is not only Donald Trump’s America that is using its power to punish those who are standing up to corporations that are invested in and profiting from genocide. In the United Kingdom, the regime of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, meaning that anyone who belongs to or expresses support for them could be handed a 14-year jail sentence in the UK.
Palestine Action never killed anyone, nor sought to hurt people. Instead, it was a group that started in 2020 and ran a campaign aimed at shutting down weapons factories. Upon the initiation of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, the activist group expanded its operations and sought to force the British government to stop selling arms to Israel.
Its primary “weapon” was red paint, while some of its direct actions involved smashing windows and equipment at factories producing weapons components that helped Tel Aviv continue its war crimes.
The End of the UN, Human Rights, and ‘Free Press’
Palestine Action was not proscribed as a terrorist organization because it posed a threat to the British public or to anyone at all. This decision was born of Israeli Lobby groups pressuring corrupt politicians who care only for their own careers and lining their pockets.
Similarly, the announcement from US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, that sanctions were being placed upon Francesca Albanese, had nothing to do with the best interests of the American people. This move came at the behest of the pro-Israel Lobby in the US.
Yes, this is the cold, hard truth. American, EU, and British politicians are so incredibly corrupt that they will weaponize the use of powers that are supposed to be reserved for cracking down on those who commit serious criminal offenses, to silence those who are opposing one of the worst crimes in modern history.
The way this system works is simple: there are mega-corporations. These corporations control the majority of the collective West’s wealth; they own everything from weapons companies to the local fast-food restaurants that people frequent on a daily basis; they also own the corporate media.
The corporate elites then ensure that lobby groups, in this case the Israel Lobby, receive adequate funding and also make their contacts with important politicians. The politicians, whose job it is to master the use of sophistry, having maneuvered themselves into positions of power, are often political novices who worked their way up as social climbers or came from well-connected families.
So, a more senior politician, as proficient as they may be in the sphere of rhetoric, needs the think tanks to advise them, because the lobby groups are often not sophisticated enough to properly communicate more complicated policy ideas. The think tanks are funded by the exact same corporate elites that finance the politicians’ campaigns and lobby groups. In other words, those experts who work for the think tanks are always going to align with whatever the agenda of their donors is; this is the way it works.
This is a simplified way of more or less explaining how the foreign policies of Western countries are commanded. It is not democratic; it is driven by profit margins and the agendas of the mega-rich. For some time, this system managed to function while providing the veneer of respectability, yet since October 7, 2023, the mask has completely fallen.
Following WWII, the international order we all know today was set up, supposedly in order to safeguard the world from plummeting into another catastrophic global war. In preventing such a global paroxysm, mechanisms were set in place through the formation of the UN’s different organs, international law, and human rights.
This is why such emphasis was always placed upon the messaging surrounding the Nazi Holocaust, the idea that everyone was taught was “never again,” which was supposed to mean something. Yet, here we are in 2025, and the Israeli regime not only exploits the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify the similar crimes to those committed against Jewish people in the 1940s, but actively erodes the very institutions set up to prevent the kinds of war crimes committed during World War II.
Meanwhile, the corporate media – funded by the same capitalist elites as the politicians and think tanks – have worked as stenographers for the governments of their given country of operations.
It should have been common sense for the media, if it were actually staffed by people who held true to their journalistic principles, to have been shouting from the rooftops from the very start of the events in Gaza. If not for the sake of the Palestinians, simply to confront the return of WWII comparisons that were justifying Israeli actions based upon actions like the bombing of Dresden or deployment of WMD against Japan, journalists should have worked to combat the rhetoric of the Israelis.
When Israel’s spokespeople began talking about Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as justifiable, these comments worked to erode decades of work from international institutions that sought to ensure comparable atrocities would never take place again.
Now we live in a world where the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are ignored by almost every EU state, along with the UK and the US. Where the world’s top human rights groups have no impact on the policy after labeling Israel’s actions as genocide and labeling it an apartheid regime.
Instead of the collective West working within the international system that they helped build and shape, they have rendered the United Nations, international law, and the very legal application of human rights about as useless as the League of Nations.
The law doesn’t exist for Israel; it only exists for the Palestinians. The Palestinian people and their supporters are held to an almost impossible moral standard, but the Israelis and their allies can commit almost any act imaginable with no consequences. In fact, if you even call out this hypocrisy, you will be branded a terrorist, censored, banned, imprisoned, sanctioned, and even murdered.
This isn’t a rules-based order; it is a criminal network behaving as a mafia, creating labels for people they don’t like to justify their disposal.
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Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
C. PC
