Generally US interventions are incompetent exercises in clumsy empire-building that fail, illustrating the aphorism, "worse than a crime, it was a blunder."
I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, an example of how not to do empire (https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/mythbusting-tour-vietnam-a-war-with-no-winner-part-1-393f013bff01). In 1984-86 I worked as a volunteer at El Rescate in LA compiling the political asylum applications of Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees and interpreting at their hearings with the Canadian consul. So I learned firsthand the consequences of criminal US intervention in support of death squad governments. (read this and you'll see we agree more often than not: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/post-cards-from-the-border-refugee-crisis-e152c3a7e96c)
I view Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 as rare exceptions that prove the rule. What was the alternative policy you advocate? My view: there was no Gandhian solution on offer in these two cases. Gandhi himself said his strategy of civil disobedience could work only because his adversary was Britain and not Germany or Japan.
If the Taliban take power again, I'd try this: hand $1-5000 to every Afghan woman who leaves Afghanistan. In a ffew years the Taliban will have nothing left to do but watch Bin Laden's porn collection.
When I see the Free Palestine protesters also demonstrating for:
Kurds bombed by Syrians and Russians
Uighurs put in Chinese forced labor camps
Rohingyas ethnically cleansed out of Burma
Syrians bombed by the Assad family business with a flag
Kurds bombed by the Turkish air force
Tatars ethnically cleansed out of Crimea....
Saudi bombing and starvation of Yemeni civilians
the Jordanian army's ejection of the PLO in Black September (10-15000 dead)
Saddam Hussein's slaughter of Kurds and Shias in 1988-91
I'll believe that the Free Palestine protests are not animated by backhanded anti-semitism by holding a Jewish state to a far higher standard when I see them demonstrate against the governments listed above. I don't recall the Turkish, Russian or Syrian air forces ever calling the inhabitants of a building to warn them to leave. I also don't recall Kurdish or anti-Assad insurgents using civilians as human shields. But Muslims slaughtering other Muslims merits no attention or protest. Chinese enslavement of Uighurs also merits no protest.
If misery alone caused terrorism, there would be far more terrorism emerging from Paraguay, Bolivia, NE Brazil, Honduras and Congo than from Muslims in London, Madrid, Berlin, Brussels, Saudi Arabia and Paris. Ideas matter and theocratic idiocy generates terrorism--whether from white Christian nationalists assaulting the US Capitol, or from misogynistic Islamists who've inherited Islam's centuries old problem with modernity and female emancipation. But that's another story (https://ljgolden55.medium.com/an-ill-fitting-suit-islam-vs-secular-government-and-individualism-3dcf0e577468).
Mythical Moses: Archeological evidence documents Jewish settlement in the land now occupied by Israel predates the Arab conquest by about 1800 years. Facts are stubborn things and this is a stubborn fact, though Arafat's negotiation support team gave him a memo that denied it at the Clinton Parameters negotiations at the White House in January 2001. I consider the joke as an allegorical route to this greater truth. The more recent arrival of "Palestinians" to this land through immigration during the British mandate is also a matter of stubborn fact you can read about on the website of the Public Record Office in London or in Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial. Who rejected and who accepted partition in 1937, 1947 and 2001 is also a matter of stubborn fact (https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/palestine-israel-slogan-demolition-in-nine-minutes-59eb99f88836)
Having taken a fist in the face from a fascist in Valencia in March 1976 because I hung out with Catalan friends who dared to show a prohibited Catalan flag, I've had direct contact with fascism and understand what American support for such regimes means.
