By Jamal Kanj

At a 19 March UN Security Council discussion, US Ambassador Samantha Powers was quoted as saying: “A thief can steal property, but that does not confer the right of ownership on the thief.”

Listening to her powerful condemnation of the Russian action in the Crimea, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a conviction or an ex-talented writer’s rhetorical speech. A thief should be condemned – irrespective of whether the thief is a friend or foe. I would add to the otherwise accurate statement that a thief-enabler should be castigated too.

Let’s for the sake of argument agree with Ms Powers’ assessment, which described as “theft” Russian support for the “overwhelming” wishes of 96 per cent of voters.

Queen of thieves

Using the same parallels, how about Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights? It is this thief which Ms Powers supports at the UN Security Council to expropriate occupied land to build Jews-only homes.

Unlike the apparent “democratic” vote in Crimea, Israel did not bother to seek the opinion of non-Jews when it decided to annex occupied territories. In relative terms, Israel received next to naught support from people in the annexed areas. Comparatively and using the ambassador’s gauge, Israel must be the queen of thieves.

Crimea’s population is made up of 70 per cent Russians, 16 per cent Ukrainians and 14 per cent Tatars. It is a historical fact that Crimea was part of Russia until the defunct Soviet Union bestowed it to Ukraine in 1954. Russia did not transplant new ethnic population; it did not create “Russian-only” roads nor built “Russian only” colonies to benefit one race or ethnic group.

Israel did all that. What does Israel have to do with all this, one might ask.

Subsidizing land theft

The US ambassador – married to Cass Sunstein, a major fundraiser for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – calls the “overwhelming vote” in Crimea a theft. This is despite the fact that her administration annually finances Israeli robbery with more than 3 billion dollars from unsuspecting US taxpayers’ money to transplant new ethnic population into illegally seized land.

Even more, the US has officially “legitimized” theft under a euphemism called exchange of 1967 stolen Palestinian land with 1948 stolen Palestinian territories.

It is the abhorrent “theft” which Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, described on 21 March as “unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing”.

Bottomless hypocrisy

Western political hypocrisy is bottomless. When the resettled British subjects voted on the future of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), British Prime Minister David Cameron called on the world to respect the overwhelming vote by all “the (1,518) Falkland Islanders” who “have spoken so clearly about their future, and now other countries right across the world, I hope, will respect and revere this very, very clear result”.

The heir of the empire that transplanted Western Zionism in Palestine might have forgotten that there are more than 2,000 x 1,518 human beings from its old colony, still denied the right to vote on their future in the West Bank and Gaza. And the country that denies them this right is supported by Cameron’s government.

How about the theft in Kosovo, South Sudan and East Timor? Or was that also another kosher/Robin Hood style theft?

Look for the AIPAC hand whenever the US gets embroiled in a foreign policy debacle. Zionist agents will engender conflict and continue riding the American wagon – as it rode the German and the British before – until the US becomes useless.

Then they will jump on the next world power wagon.

A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper.