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There’s an old adage that goes: “You can judge a man by the company he keeps.”

If that’s the case, then applying it to nations, the world has to judge the US to be a truly wretched and repugnant country, and should be steering clear of it.

Look at the company we Americans are “keeping” these days:

* In Ukraine, the US is backing a thuggish regime, installed through a bloody coup that overthrew a democratically elected government. That regime, since taking power, been using indescriminately shelling cities, and using fascist thugs re-classified as National Guardsmen to slaughter civilians and separatist rebels in the eastern part of the country. It is also becoming increasingly clear, as even the main English-language newspaper in Malaysia is reporting, that this thuggish regime based in Kiev was likely responsible for the deliberate downing of a Malaysian airline which killed all 283 passengers and crew (though the Obama administration continues to claim, on the basis of no evidence, that it was the separatists’ doing).

* In Israel, we have a government and the ironically named Israeli Defense Force (IDF) slaughtering nearly 2000 Palestinians — over 400 of them children — trapped in the massive open-air prison and ghetto called Gaza. For over a month, the IDF has been relentlessly bombing, shelling and rolling tanks and bulldozers over the world’s most crowded prison camp and its 1.8 million people, deliberately shelling schools, hospitals, sewage treatment and water plants, and the only power generating facility, creating an incomprehensible humanitarian crisis. Israel is the single largest recipient of US financial and military aid, and most of the death and destruction in Gaza is the direct result of US-provided arms — weapons that include flesh-shredding anti-personnel shells and bombs, toxic gas and illegally used white phosphorus incendiary weapons. In fact, the US rushed more such deadly weapons to Israel as the IDF ran its stocks down in this one-sided assault on the walled-in Gaza-wide free-fire kill zone.

* Over in Syria, where the US has been covertly supplying arms to an assortment of fanatic Islamic jihadists intent on overthrowing the dictator Bashar al Assad, we now know that it was those very jihadists, and not the Assad government, that cooly launched a deadly Sarin gas attack on a suburb of Damascus last year, killing hundreds. They did this monstrous crime in an attempt to throw blame on Assad and lure the US into joining the war against his regime — and came within a day of succeeding. More recently we learn that those jihadists, many of whom were trained by the CIA at secret camps in Jordan, have been stoning women in Syria to death for “adultery,” often forcing local villagers unwilling to participate in such horrors to watch this medieval atrocity.

* Those same jihadis, trained by the US, are also sweeping across much of Iraq now, taking control of even large cities like Mosul, and slaughtering many of those in areas they conquer. There the US has been forced by this “blow-back” from its earlier support to turn on its trainees, much as it had to do a decade ago in Afghanistan, to begin bombing its wayward proteges to slow their advance. But let’s not forget that the people the US is now attacking in Iraq are the very people whom it earlier armed and trained to fight against Assad in neighboring Syria.

Of course, the US has many other vicious and unsavory “friends” all around the globe, in Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador and Bolivia, Honduras and Colombia for example. But just judging by these three groups that it is backing — the Ukraine government, the Israeli government and the Islamic rebels in Syria — one can only conclude that the US is a truly global menace and leading source of international mayhem and terror.

The countries of Europe that are still part of the anachronistic, Cold War-era North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) should listen to the growing voices of anger and alarm among their citizens who recognize that the United States, far from providing them with security, is stirring up conflict all around the globe (not to mention spying on, and probably extorting, their compromised leaders). Particularly in Ukraine, along Russia’s southern border, and in Palestine, these actions pose threats that could ultimately drag Europe into violent conflagrations that have not been seen since the end of World War II, nearly 70 years ago.

Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza, and its continued brutal occupation and usurpation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, will surely lead to a new explosion of violence and anger across the Middle East, which will almost certainly spill over into Europe. Meanwhile, one push too far — and we may be nearing that point — and the US and it’s “friends” in Kiev may trigger a Russian invasion of Ukraine in defense of the embattled Russian minority in that country. With over 20,000 heavily mechanized and well-trained Russian troops already on the border with Ukraine, and a huge modern airforce at the ready, the stage is set for such a cross-border action. If the US and its NATO “allies” were to attempt to block such a Russian action, World War III would be just one incident away.

The best action to take when someone is known to consort with thuggish or unsavory friends is to cut off contact with that person. Likewise, it would be wise for the nations of the world, and especially those currently linked to Washington through membership in NATO, to cut their ties with the world’s leading terror organization and perpetrator of violence: The United States of America.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).