Above photo: An announcement on the FIFA website is displayed in this illustration taken, February 28, 2022. Reuters.
Since early last Thursday, in what has seemingly finally brought an end to the two-year long COVID-19 corporate media narrative, a Russian military intervention in neighbouring Ukraine, launched in response to almost nine years of NATO provocations following Kiev coming under the rule of the successive pro-Western governments of Petro Poroshenko and Voldymyr Zelensky since the 2014 Euromaidan colour revolution, has dominated media headlines worldwide –with Moscow coming in for levels of global condemnation not seen since the Cold War.
US President Joe Biden, in tandem with the other G7 members, immediately announced wide-ranging sanctions targeting the Russian economy, President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyen banned Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik News across the EU’s 27 member states, and in the wake of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s earlier suspension of the proposed Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Germany and Russia, following Moscow’s formal recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk’s People’s Republics last Monday, more than 140 staff were laid off by the pipeline’s Swiss-based operator Nord Stream 2 AG in the wake of wider sanctions following the Russian intervention, with the company considering an outright declaration of bankruptcy altogether.
Of course, the obvious reaction to these sanctions by onlookers familiar to the actions of the US-NATO hegemony would be to ask why nothing similar was carried out when allied states were carrying out war crimes, such as Israel’s Summer 2014 bombardment of Gaza, leading to the deaths of more than 2,000 Palestinians over the space of seven weeks, or Saudi Arabia’s now seven year long war and blockade against neighbouring Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab Peninsula, and one which has now suffered the largest Cholera outbreak in recorded history and a famine resulting in the deaths of more than 85,000 children owing to Riyadh’s Western-backed actions – with perhaps the most demonstrable display of this hypocrisy being Monday’s declaration by football world governing body FIFA that Russia would be suspended from the upcoming 2022 World Cup, due to be held in a country that has played a key role in the now eleven year long Western proxy war against Syria resulting in an estimated 350,000 deaths – Qatar.
In 2009, following a refusal by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to allow US-allied Doha to build a pipeline through his country, one which would have undermined his relationship with key ally Russia, a plan was quickly hatched by the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Israel to instigate a violent coup in the Arab Republic in order to remove Assad’s government and replace it with a Western-friendly leadership.
In March 2011, one month after a similar Western-orchestrated regime change operation took hold in Libya, the CIA’s Timber Sycamore initiative would see Salafist terrorists groups, armed, funded and trained by the West and its allies, launch a brutal terrorist campaign against Damascus – one that would see vast swathes of the secular nation coming under their control, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of groups such as Christians and Shia Muslims.
In June 2013, Iran and Hezbollah intervened at the request of the Syrian government, with Tehran knowing that the toppling of Assad’s rule would embolden the regime change lobby to quickly place the Islamic Republic in its sights, an intervention that played a key role in defending the Arab Republic from NATO-backed terrorist groups, though what would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the tide in Damascus’ favour would come in September 2015 – an air campaign launched by Russia against the terrorist groups, again at the official request of Damascus, and which ensured that eleven years on, the government of Bashar al-Assad still remains in place.
This is not to discount the devastation inflicted on Syria since 2011 however, with thousands killed and billions of pounds worth of damage caused to vital Syrian infrastructure – devastation that Qatar, via its funding and arming of the terrorists who carried it out, played a key part in, though in stark contrast to the wide-ranging sanctions imposed in the Western response to the Russian intervention in Ukraine, has been rewarded with the hosting of a prestigious sporting tournament instead.