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"The most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," said one critic.
Matthew Miller—the former U.S. State Department spokesperson who smirked and lied his way through the Biden administration's support for Israel's annihilation of Gaza—now acknowledges that Israel has committed war crimes, but for many critics his admission is "too little, too late," as one critic said Tuesday.
Asked Monday by Sky News "Trump 100" podcast host Mark Stone whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—as alleged by a growing number of experts and in an ongoing International Court of Justice case—Miller said: "I don't think it's a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes."
"'Just following orders' alibi lost its efficacy after 1945."
When Stone said that "you wouldn't have said that at the podium" during his Biden administration tenure, Miller replied: "When you're at the podium, you're not expressing your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United States government."
Numerous online critics blasted Miller's " just following orders" reply, with some noting that a number of State Department officials resigned in opposition to the Biden administration's support for Israel.
"Miller is a war criminal," Indian author and scholar Sunny Singh said, pointing to the legal principle established during the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officials stating that "the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Another academic, Oxford University professor and lawyer Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, said that "Miller is a despicable person who willingly accepted to be the face of a genocide to provide cover for one of the most horrific mass atrocities of this century and is now trying to escape a sinking ship. He is irredeemable."
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said on social media: "For months on end, in his position as State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller lied through his teeth by denying Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza. Too little, too late, Matt, to finally admit it."
Entrepreneur-turned-commentator Arnaud Bertrand called Miller the "lowest of the low" in a lengthy social media post.
"Miller was quite literally the face of the U.S. covering for Israel, denying their war crimes on the podium day in and day out, all with his characteristic smirk," Bertrand said. "And NOW, after tens of thousands of women and children were massacred, he says he actually knew full well he was lying to the public, but that he was just doing his job and following orders."
"And the most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," Bertrand added. "We're seeing more and more cases like his as the scale of the horrors that happened—and are still happening—in Gaza is becoming more and more impossible to deny. They're nothing more than opportunists trying to salvage their reputations on the graves of those they helped kill."
Miller's acknowledgment of Israeli war crimes marks a stark departure from what he typically said during many of his press briefings, when he repeatedly said that the Biden administration determined Israel was not breaking international law. Israel's conduct in the war prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged extermination and weaponized starvation—
Even as the Biden administration received hundreds of reports that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using U.S.-supplied weapons to kill and maim thousands of Palestinian civilians, Miller kept pushing the false narrative that Israel was not committing war crimes, despite internal department findings and outside expert assessments.
Miller went even further, accusing United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of antisemitism in a bid to discredit her criticism of Israel and its U.S. and Western enablers, whom she called the "axis of genocide."
During one contentious exchange with journalist Sam Husseini, Miller acknowledged what many experts including in the Biden administration had warned: that the actual death toll in Gaza "could very well be more" than the roughly 38,000 Palestinians that the Gaza Health Ministry reported at the time. Asked by Husseini about a peer-reviewed study in the prestigious U.K. medical journal The Lancet estimating up to 186,000 indirect deaths in Gaza, Miller stumbled through his attempt at a response.
"You're smirking as you say that," Husseini said, giving birth to the "Count Smirkula" meme that dogged Miller for the rest of his tenure.
"Count Smirkula, Ma[t]thew Miller, stood on the podium day in and day out, denying Israel's war crimes," Palestinian engineer and researcher Bashar Zapen noted on social media. "The U.S. knew. Biden knew. Miller knew. He smirked every time he lied. Hope he smirks in hell."
During a press meeting on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the US is aware that the death toll in Gaza “could very well be more” than what has been reported. pic.twitter.com/Gqs4Mim9it
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 10, 2024
Miller also said during the Sky News interview that there were "debates" about whether to suspend arms transfers to Israel, "and you saw at times us hold back certain arms while we negotiated the use of those arms."
However, at the time Miller denied that the Biden administration was considering any suspension of the billions of dollars in U.S. armed aid to Israel, which included bombs used in some of the deadliest IDF massacres in Gaza, such as the October 31, 2023 bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp with 2,000-pound bombs in which at least 126 civilians were killed in a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander.
The Biden administration knew that the IDF had lifted all curbs on civilian harm following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, explicitly allowing the killing of an unlimited number of civilians in order to eliminate any Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Faced with growing congressional opposition to sending arms to Israel, the Biden administration repeatedly bypassed Congress to keep the armaments flowing.
The staggering Gaza death toll eventually prompted the Biden administration to temporarily suspend shipment of some arms including 2,000-pound bombs. But the shipments soon resumed and the death toll in Gaza—which now reportedly stands at more than 54,500 after nearly 20 months of Israel's onslaught and starvation-inducing siege—continued to rise.
Journalists—hundreds of whom have been killed or maimed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 2023—were particularly dismissive of Miller's acknowledgment.
"Zero respect for Matthew Miller,"
Washington Post opinion columnist Rana Ayyub wrote on the social media site X. "Day after day, he defended war crimes, gaslit the suffering of Gazans, and helped shape public opinion to justify atrocities—including the killing of journalists."
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed
said on the same site that "we will also never forgive and forget you, and you will always be remembered as the smirker of the Gaza Genocide."
"You also must be held accountable," he added.
"Palestinians don't just die, they get killed. They are actually being subjected to ethnic cleansing, to genocide for the last 75 years."
A U.K.-based Palestinian journalist took a Sky News presenter to task during a weekend interview in which the 23-year-old Gaza native challenged the Western media's misleading framing, double standards, and lack of critical context during coverage of Israel's war on the Gazan people.
Yara Eid—who is from Gaza City but lives in Edinburgh—pushed back after the Sky newsreader said that "it has been two weeks since Hamas first launched its attack on Israel that saw 1,400 people killed," and "since then, Palestinian officials say more than 4,000 people have died in Gaza."
Eid noted that the presenter referred to the Israelis murdered by Palestinian militants as being "killed," while describing Gazans slain by Israeli bombs, missiles, and artillery as having "died."
"I think language is really important to use because, as a journalist, you have the moral responsibility to report on what's happening," she said.
"Palestinians don't just die, they get killed," Eid stressed. "They are actually being subjected to ethnic cleansing, to genocide for the last 75 years."
"And you also mentioned that this is a Hamas-Israel war. This is not it," she said. "And framing it as such is very misleading because it poses the thing that Israel is an equal power, but it's an occupying power and it has the responsibility of protecting all civilian lives and children in Gaza."
"You need, as a journalist, to report on what's happening and say it as it is," Eid asserted.
Eid shared that 30 members of her immediate family—including 17 children—were killed by Israeli occupation forces.
The young journalist also said her best friend, Ain Media photographer Ibrahim Mohammad Lafi, was shot dead by Israeli troops. He is one of at least 20 journalists and 35 United Nations personnel who have been killed by Israeli bombs or bullets since the start of the war.
Palestinian journalists Yara Eid (left) and Ibrahimn Mohammad Lafi pose for a photo. (Photo: Yara Eid)
Since October 7, Israeli forces have killed nearly 5,100 people in Gaza, including more than 2,000 children, while wounding over 15,000 others, destroying almost 170,000 homes, and displacing around 1.4 million residents in what many experts have called a genocidal campaign.
Sky News was forced to apologize over the weekend after another host, Kay Burley, falsely claimed that a guest, Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K. Husam Zomlot, justified the Hamas attack by saying that "Israel had it coming."
Tensions are again soaring in Ukraine on Tuesday as leaders of the interim government in the western capitol city of Kiev trade accusations and threats with leaders in Moscow (and themselves) over events in eastern cities of the country closer to its Russian border.
As security forces sent from Kiev cleared protesters from government buildings in the city of Kharkiv, arresting 70 pro-Russian activists in the process, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that further violence against those demanding their right to a referendum on independence from Ukraine could lead to civil war.
"We are calling for the immediate cessation of any military preparations, which could lead to civil war," the Russians said in a statement.
As the interim Ukraine government announced preparations for a larger security operation for Kharkiv and the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russians accused Kiev of including hired mercenaries from the private U.S. military firm Greystone as part of its "special operations" units in addition to members of far-right and nationalist militias.
According to CNN:
The ministry alleged that what it called "American experts from the private military organization Greystone," disguised as soldiers, as well as militants from the Ukrainian far-right group Right Sector, had joined Ukrainian forces preparing for the crackdown in the country's east.
Late Monday, Ukrainian special forces cleared armed protesters from the headquarters of Ukrainian security services in Donetsk, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov's office announced.
But Ukraine's interim Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Yarema was quoted by Russian state-run news agency ITAR-Tass as saying Tuesday that the authorities are not going to storm the city's regional administration building. Yarema said the decision was made after talks with representatives of the protesters in the building.
A CNN team on the ground said that pro-Russian protesters appear still to be in control of the building and that there is no sign of special forces nearby.
In the city of Luhansk, pro-Russian separatists continued to occupy the Security Services Buildings and are reportedly better armed after accessing a weapons depot inside.
In Donetsk, where those who took over the central administrative buildings declared independence on Monday and demanded a referendum by week's end, a standoff between security forces continued. There, according to Reuters, "steel-and-energy tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, is mediating with the protesters, but he may have complicated the plans of the authorities by publicly urging authorities not to use force as a solution."
Brawl in Parliament
Meanwhile, in Kiev, a "brawl" broke out in the parliament building as left-leaning PMs clashed with their right-wing counterparts over the manner in which the crisis in Crimea and now these other eastern cities has been handled.
Watch:
Punch Up In Ukrainian Parliament Over Events In Kharkiv, Lugansk and DonetskA session of the Ukrainian parliament has descended into a brawl as rival factions argued over who was to blame for events in the ...
According to the Guardian:
A brawl erupted in the Ukrainian parliament chamber after the country's communist leader accused nationalists of playing into the hands of Russia by adopting extreme tactics early in the Ukrainian crisis.
Two deputies from the Svoboda far-right nationalist party took exception to the charges by communist Petro Symonenko and seized him while he was talking from the rostrum. His supporters rallied to his defence and a brawl broke out with deputies from other parties joining in and trading punches. [...]
Against the backdrop of the deepening crisis in the south-east, Symonenko stirred nationalist anger in parliament when, referring to the pro-Russian protesters who had seized buildings in eastern Ukraine, he suggested that nationalists had set a precedent earlier this year by seizing public buildings in protest at the rule of the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Now, he said, armed groups were attacking people who wanted to defend their rights by peaceful means. "You are today doing everything to intimidate people. You arrest people, start fighting people who have a different point of view," he said, before being pulled away from the rostrum by the Svoboda deputies.
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