Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Jerusalem

It is true that Condoleezza Rice is smarter than her conspicuously ignorant boss, President George Bush.

However, in terms of moral character, it is amply clear that Rice is at least as dishonest and mendacious as her boss is.

After all, we are talking about a woman who knows little or no moral distinction between truth and falsehood and between right and wrong.

This the very woman who two years ago had the guts to congratulate her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, on the “success” of the Nazi-like blockade Israel had been imposing on the Gaza Strip, which destroyed the Gaza economy and pushed 1.5 million innocent human beings to the brink of Auschwitz.

A silent genocide, after all, is still genocide, and it makes no difference if the victims die in gas chambers or die a slow, agonizing death as a result of starvation.

This is the woman who reacted to the widespread destruction by Israel of Lebanese population centers and the dropping by the Israeli air force of 2-3 million cluster bomblets, enough to kill or maim 2-3 million children, by saying, "Israel has the right to defend itself."

In 2006, Rice described the annihilation of hundreds of innocent civilians in Lebanon, including entire families that were asleep in the privacy of their homes, as representing “the pangs for the birth of a new Middle East.”

And now, with the looming end of the nefarious Bush administration, Rice is concluding her term as Secretary of State with another concentrated dose of pornographic lies about Bush’s and her legacy.

In a recent interview with the BBC , Rice said she believed that the Middle East was a better place for the policies of President Bush, adding that the U.S. had helped advance the cause of freedom.

“The Middle East is a different place and a better place.” Asked to assess the outgoing U.S. administration’s legacy, Rice said she was "especially proud of the situation in the Palestinian territories."

Well, the woman is just fornicating with language, not only because what she is saying is totally and absolutely false, but mainly because she is most likely aware that her ravings and ratings have little to do with truth and reality.

Of course, no one is claiming that the Middle East was the Garden of Eden before the advent of the Bush administration.

However, after eight years of Bush’s political nihilism, imperialistic hubris, pugnacity and bloody aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is manifestly clear that the cause of freedom, democracy and human rights nearly all over the Middle East is taking a back seat, to put it very mildly

Just take a fleeting look at the state of human rights and civil liberties in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf-States, Tunisia and the quasi-autonomous Palestinian enclaves and you will be appalled by the police-State apparatus being consolidated in these countries.

Another example is Israel, the so-called only true democracy in the Middle East. There is a manifestly racist discourse against the estimated 5 million Palestinians in Israel, especially in the West Bank and Gaza Strip where the Ashkenazi establishment is carrying a slow-motion campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Palestinian inhabitants, often in coordination with Jewish terrorists, otherwise known as settlers.

The calls of “death to the Arabs” and “Arabs out of Israel” are no longer uttered by a small minority of miscreants and right-wing thugs but are spreading fast to the mainstream Jewish population.

The recent virtual pogrom of the Arabs of Akka—the indigenous inhabitants of the ancient coastal city—is undoubtedly clarion proof that Israel is walking in the same path that Germany walked in the early part of the past century. We all know the rest of the story.

In 2006, the Bush administration bullied Mahmoud Abbas, the American-backed chairman of the PA, to hold legislative elections in the shadow of Israeli occupation tanks.

Bush then apparently hoped that CIA-backed elements would win the elections which then would allow for the liquidation of the Palestinian cause in one way or the other.

However, when the Islamic group Hamas won a landslide victory, beating the Fatah organization, an infuriated Bush immediately severed all aid to the Palestinian people and severed all ties with the Palestinian Authority.

Furthermore, he encouraged the Nazi-like Israeli state to impose a draconian economic and financial blockade on the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the purpose of punishing Palestinians for daring to elect the “wrong people.”

Soon after the elections, the CIA collaborated with Palestinian agents in the Gaza Strip to spark the flames of civil war, prompting the elected Hamas government to crush and oust the conspirators who later regrouped in Ramallah.

But even this didn’t deter the Bush administration from continuing to actively interfere in internal Palestinian affairs, all in order to deepen Palestinian divisions and create a police-state junta similar to those created by the CIA in central and South America in the second half of the twentieth century.

Today, thanks to this brazen and heavy-handed intervention in the occupied Palestinian territories, the rule of law is virtually paralyzed, the security agencies arrest, imprison, torture and occasionally murder suspects, openly trampling on the rule of law.

In light, one really is at a loss trying to understand what makes Rice especially proud "of the situation in the occupied territories."

As to the proverbial “peace process,” it is clinically dead as years of intensive talks and negotiations between an insolent Israeli government and a vanquished supplicant called the “Palestinian Authority” produced no breakthroughs, mainly because Israel refuses to give up the spoils of the 1967 war.

This happened as Israel was continuing unabated to erect apartheid walls, steal more Palestinian land and build more Jewish-only colonies on occupied territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem while U.S. officials continued to voice the same tired platitudes and diplomatic formulas advising Israel not to take steps that might undermine the peace process.

So one would really wonder: what makes Rice particularly proud of the situation in Palestine?

In Iraq, where, according to Rice, freedom is gaining, the country has been plunged into an internecine civil war thanks to the short-sighted American invasion and occupation of that Arab country.

The death of nearly a million Iraqis is more than enough to judge the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as a criminal act of immense proportions, especially in light of the fact that the invasion was based on lies concocted by evil-minded people like Bush, Rice and Powell. The blood of hundreds of thousands of victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia and other places is squarely on their evil hands.

Undoubtedly, they will be punished for their horrible crimes, if not in this world, then in the hereafter.

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By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Jerusalem, For Palestine Times (November-2008) Posted on: www.xpis.ps