About those Torture Camps

Karl H Christ
3 min readAug 12, 2024

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The Israeli military is running a network of torture camps where they brutalize, rape, and kill prisoners. That’s not hyperbole or propaganda, but the findings made public by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and further supported by video evidence of soldiers sexually abusing a prisoner, presented on an Israeli news program. Rather than show contrition or demonstrate that they will be holding the abusers responsible, the Israeli government has ignored, justified, or actively protested the suggestion that the torturers, rapists, and killers even be questioned. The United States, ever deferential to its favorite genocidal client state, has offered only toothless suggestions that the Israeli government should “investigate” the “allegations.” In the weakest possible criticism of despicable human rights violations, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that there “ought (emphasis added) to be zero tolerance” for the documented crimes and suggested that if the Israeli government finds that their soldiers committed the “alleged” crimes, they should be held accountable. Good luck with that. A government that condones and encourages human rights abuses, when it isn’t actively committing them itself, is very likely to punish their own soldiers because one of the Biden administration’s apologist puppets suggested that they should.

Once again, the “most moral army in the world” has exposed itself as being viciously immoral, and once again it is very unlikely that there will be any consequences for its actions or any backing down from the hypocritical charade. Having principles and a code of ethics only means anything if you actually adhere to them. The Israeli military has some moral principles on paper, but they continually demonstrate to their enemies, their victims, their own people, and the world, that they don’t feel duty bound to follow them. You can’t destroy whole communities and kill tens of thousands of innocent people, and you can’t torture and rape people, and continue to claim to have a moral code. It’s an insult to everyone’s intelligence, as well as to that code and those that actually believe in it.

The US, incidentally, has not just lofty moral codes but actual laws that our military is legally (if rarely in practice) required to follow, and our government has laws regarding to whom it can provide military aid. The Leahy Laws, for example, prohibit providing aid to foreign military forces that have committed gross human rights violations. The United States government is in violation of these laws every time they heap more billions of dollars worth of weapons on the Israeli military. They’re not the only violators we arm, of course. They are by far the biggest recipient of aid and may be the only one currently conducting a genocide, but it’s not as though we haven’t given tons of military aid to murderous and dictatorial regimes that have regularly committed human rights violations in Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, several countries in South America, and many others. The US supports three quarters of the world’s dictators, and has never had a real problem with that gross immorality, regardless of the law.

As these recent stories have further exposed the crimes of the Israeli military and government, they’ve done the same for America’s complicity in these crimes. We provide the tools for war crimes and human rights abuses to be committed with impunity, as well as the cover for them to be done without consequences. Hell, it’s not as though our military and government haven’t personally committed war crimes and human rights abuses with impunity and without consequences. In that sense, it would be nearly as hypocritical for us to actually hold other countries accountable than it is to pretend that we do.

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