Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : When a thief is caught and punished, justice has been done in that case. It does not follow that every theft has been detected or every thief punished. This distinction becomes consequential when powerful states cite a handful of military prosecutions as evidence that their overseas operations function within an effective system of accountability.
The arrest of a U.S. Marine in Okinawa on suspicion of robbery and murder brings that distinction into focus in Oct 2026. The allegation remains unproven, but the public anger surrounding it reflects earlier crimes, including the 1995 assault of a schoolgirl by American servicemen and the 2016 rape and murder committed by a former Marine working as a base contractor.
America presents its military power as a shield for freedom, democracy, and international order. Israeli officials likewise invoke military morality. Such declarations invite examination against conduct. A victim’s family cannot measure ethical standards through speeches, recruiting slogans, or the existence of disciplinary regulations. Its concern is whether the person responsible will answer for what happened.
Prosecutions establish that particular offenders were held accountable. They cannot reveal how many offenses escaped detection, how many complaints were abandoned, or how many victims lacked the means to pursue justice. The unseen total cannot responsibly be invented. Neither can it be assumed away because a government produces several examples of punishment.
Military contracting makes this problem more complicated. Private companies perform legitimate tasks, including transport, maintenance, construction, and protection. But when public operations pass through commercial contracts, responsibility can become dispersed among commanders, officials, corporations, and subcontractors. Victims confront an institutional maze while the government retains the benefit of the services it commissioned.
This concern comes from within the American military scholarship itself. Deborah Kidwell’s 2005 study, Public War, Private Fight?, published by the Army’s Combat Studies Institute, described divided authority over contractors and warned that it could obscure responsibility. The author’s views were not official policy, but the publication demonstrates that these structural weaknesses were recognized decades ago.
Kidwell discussed allegations of sexual slavery and illegal weapons purchases involving contractor employees in Bosnia. She also examined contractor interrogation work at Abu Ghraib and difficulties bringing criminal prosecutions. Her study provides grounds for questioning whether outsourcing can weaken accountability precisely where the exercise of power requires the strongest supervision.
Nisour Square illustrates both the possibility and fragility of justice. Blackwater guards killed 14 unarmed civilians in Baghdad in September 2007, according to American prosecutors. Four guards were convicted; Nicholas Slatten eventually received life imprisonment. President Donald Trump pardoned all four in December 2020. Punishment established through judicial proceedings was subsequently removed through political authority.
Those convictions cannot be treated as proof that other contractor abuses were discovered or punished. Nor can the pardons be separated from their wider message. Iraqi families watched the country financing the security operation forgive men convicted over civilian deaths. Legal accountability had existed, but its consequences proved vulnerable to presidential preference.
The regular forces also supply documented examples. Steven Green received life imprisonment for his role in the rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her family. Robert Bales received life without parole after murdering 16 Afghan civilians. Calvin Gibbs was convicted following staged killings of Afghan civilians presented as legitimate combat encounters.
These cases expose grave crimes; they do not measure the full extent of misconduct. Haditha offers a different outcome: 24 Iraqi civilians were killed, while the final defendant pleaded guilty to negligent dereliction of duty and received no imprisonment. The distance between human loss and legal consequence deserves examination beyond simply counting convictions.
Corruption further connects uniformed authority with private enterprise. In Afghanistan, soldiers and a contractor employee used fraudulent transport documents to facilitate fuel theft exceeding a million dollars. Their prosecution established responsibility for that scheme. It supplied no basis for concluding that every comparable scheme had been uncovered or that oversight worked consistently.
Remote warfare introduces another distance between power and consequence. Reported signature strikes targeted suspected militants through behavioral patterns without necessarily identifying them by name. Contractors support drone operations, although involvement does not establish independent authority to order killings. The central concern is the reliability of decisions that turn observed association into grounds for lethal force.
Reporting on leaked records from Operation Haymaker described a five-month period during the 2012–2013 Afghanistan campaign when nearly 90 percent of those killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. This does not establish that all were civilians. It does expose the inadequacy of treating technological accuracy as a guarantee of narrow human consequences.
The human cost becomes unbearable when children are involved. In March 2026, Reuters reported preliminary investigative findings pointing toward likely American responsibility for the February strike on an Iranian girls’ school. Iranian authorities reported 168 children killed. Attribution required investigation; the suffering demanded answers that could withstand independent scrutiny rather than reassurance from those conducting the war.
Leadership shapes the atmosphere in which restraint operates. On April 7, Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” before later agreeing to a ceasefire. His administration portrayed the threat as negotiating pressure. Yet the language placed an entire people within a threat of destruction, treating their collective existence as an instrument of coercion.
Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of “stupid rules of engagement” compounds the concern. Rules governing military force help protect civilians and translate legal obligations into operational decisions. When senior officials disparage restraint, their words risk encouraging subordinates to regard caution as weakness. That risk extends across America’s extensive overseas presence and into the relationships troops maintain with host communities.
Watching the Avatar films, I recognized a disturbing metaphor in the colonel’s treatment of another world’s inhabitants as obstacles to domination. Fiction proves nothing about particular operations. It nevertheless dramatizes the intoxication of power: overwhelming capability becoming, in the aggressor’s imagination, sufficient justification for violence. Military superiority then takes the place of moral reasoning.
The danger also returns home. When leaders teach that strength places a nation above rules, they weaken the principle that authority must justify itself. Citizens may then encounter the same reasoning in domestic policing, political disputes, and public administration. Foreign victims experience the immediate consequences, but Americans inherit the institutional habits formed when their government exercises power without sufficient scrutiny or durable corrective consequences.
A contract cannot erase responsibility for public power. Accountability requires examination of those who commission, supervise, and authorize operations, alongside those who carry them out. Isolated punishments cannot answer complaints that remain uninvestigated. American citizens can demand disclosure, meaningful independent scrutiny, and consequences that survive political convenience. A country’s ethical standing depends on the restraint it practices, not the innocence it proclaims.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : The confrontation at the United Nations exposed a widening divide: the United States and Israel’s leadership on one side, and a broad international rejection of their account of the Middle East conflict on the other. Washington and Netanyahu have constructed a narcissistic political worldview in which their fears command universal attention, their violence demands justification, and the suffering of others must remain subordinate.
They expect the world to see Gaza, Iran, and settlement expansion in the West Bank exclusively through their lens. The diplomats walking out as Netanyahu approached the podium delivered a blunt answer: the world cannot be ordered to see what they see, excuse what they excuse, or forget what they wish forgotten. Other nations can examine the destruction, hear the testimony, and reach their own conclusions. Military power cannot compel agreement, and repetition cannot turn a self-serving narrative into truth.
President Trump raised the prospect of annihilating Iran. Netanyahu defended Israel’s military campaigns, insulted departing diplomats, attacked Western governments, and berated the elected mayor of the city hosting him. Outside, protesters demanded an end to American arms supplies sustaining the destruction. Inside, Netanyahu demanded recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself while dismissing the objections raised against its conduct. The contradiction could hardly have been more glaring.
Iran is a nation, not a target awaiting destruction. Its children, workers, teachers, and elderly people are not interchangeable with its government or military command. Threatening annihilation from a podium established to prevent catastrophic warfare mocks the institution’s purpose. What meaning does international security retain when the powerful threaten entire countries and then demand that everyone else demonstrate restraint?
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian answered with photographs of the dead: the assassinated Ali Khamenei and children killed at the Minab school. Washington accused Iran of terrorism; Iran’s president presented the victims of violence inflicted upon his country. Whatever judgement one makes about Tehran’s leadership, its children cannot inherit a death sentence because of their government. Their humanity requires neither American approval nor Israeli recognition.
Then came Netanyahu and his denunciation of the diplomats walking out as “moral cowards.” What courage, precisely, was he claiming? The courage to dismiss international condemnation? To ridicule those refusing to applaud? The empty seats did not represent every nation, but they exposed the distance between his government’s self-justification and the judgement of many countries assembled before him. Insulting the audience could not answer the indictment.
Netanyahu’s international isolation is becoming a devastating indictment of his leadership. The International Criminal Court arrest warrant restricts his ability to travel to many countries, once-steadfast allies Britain, France, and Canada have imposed sanctions targeting Israeli settlements, and dozens of diplomats abandoned the chamber as he began speaking.
His government could purchase 500 billboards across Manhattan, but it could not purchase international legitimacy. Outside, protesters demanded an end to the weapons supplies sustaining Israel’s campaigns; inside, empty seats exposed the limits of his defiance. This is the humiliation of a leader who mistakes the capacity to inflict destruction for the authority to command respect. Calling his critics cowards cannot conceal the reality: he is leading Israel deeper into diplomatic estrangement while demanding that the world applaud the policies driving it there.
His attack on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani made that arrogance unmistakable. Netanyahu accused him of supporting Hamas, which Mamdani denied. A visiting prime minister has no mandate to supervise American democracy or dictate whom New Yorkers should elect. He may answer criticism, but his office grants him no authority over the city’s mayor. Americans owe a foreign leader neither political obedience nor silence. Friendship between countries cannot mean that American politicians become acceptable only when they satisfy the government of Israel.
Outside the United Nations, that criticism had a distinctly American voice. Protesters demanded an end to the arming of Israel and called for Palestinians and Iranians to be allowed to live. Police detained demonstrators, including actors Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder, congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, and city council member Chi Ossé. These were people exercising their right to challenge policies supported by their own government.
Their presence shattered any convenient equation between Washington’s policy and unanimous American consent. Netanyahu could praise Trump inside the chamber; he could not make the dissent outside disappear. Americans are entitled to question where their weapons go, what their taxes sustain, and whether their country’s alliances advance peace or perpetuate destruction. No visiting leader can legitimately demand exemption from those questions.
His assault on Western governments followed the same pattern. Britain, France, and Canada had announced sanctions targeting Israeli settlements. Netanyahu accused their leaders of surrendering to antisemitic mobs. Measures directed at settlements became, in his telling, evidence of moral collapse. But opposition to settlement expansion does not constitute hatred of Jews. Antisemitism must be confronted; it cannot become a shield against scrutiny of state policy.
Other responses were equally pointed. Qatar said Netanyahu’s attacks diverted attention from responsibility for policies on the ground. Turkey’s presidential communications director, Burhanettin Duran, said his accusations could not obscure Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe or international legal proceedings. The answer to criticism was accountability, not an expanding catalogue of enemies.
His treatment of settler killings illustrated the problem. The BBC reported his suggestion that perhaps two or three people were killed annually, then cited UN figures recording hundreds of Palestinians killed in the context of settler attacks since the beginning of 2023. These are human beings, not inconvenient arithmetic. Minimising their deaths diminishes the violence confronting entire communities.
The pager display carried a menace beyond its reference to the operation against Hezbollah. Before an institution dedicated to peace, Netanyahu brandished a reminder that communications devices could become instruments of assassination. The gesture could be read as a warning to governments walking out or imposing sanctions: defy Israel and consider how far its reach might extend. Operations in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria gave that implied warning its chilling force. This was intimidation dressed as triumph—an exhibition of lethal capability that invited critics to contemplate consequences beyond the diplomatic chamber.
October 7 cannot provide permanent immunity from judgement. The murder of Israeli civilians and hostage-taking were atrocities. Their victims deserve justice. Palestinian children did not consequently lose their rights. No atrocity authorises unlimited destruction, and no ancient religious promise can serve as a modern eviction order. Any vision of Greater Israel built upon Palestinian dispossession deserves rejection. That judgement concerns political domination, not Jewish identity.
Iran’s nuclear programme also requires answers beyond slogans. Pezeshkian says Tehran was prepared to dilute highly enriched uranium and accept international verification. Those insisting upon war must explain why negotiated restraints cannot achieve their stated objective.
Americans deserve that explanation before more soldiers and resources are committed. Their country is not an inexhaustible military account for another government’s ambitions. Every dollar consumed by destruction is unavailable for another public need.
The governments that walked out must likewise move beyond symbolism. Empty seats cannot feed children or protect families. Protest must produce action.
Washington and Netanyahu may insist upon their own account of this conflict. They cannot demand ownership of everyone else’s judgement. The dead, the displaced, and the bereaved remain visible beyond their carefully constructed lens. The walkout exposed the failure of their demand for unquestioning acceptance. The next test is whether the governments rejecting that demand will act with the courage their convictions require.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : For countless people living in developing countries, the United States and Europe have represented a dream. This attraction is not based only on wealth, employment or a higher standard of living. More importantly, these societies have been regarded as places where the state does not discriminate among citizens on the basis of religion, color, race or creed. For people persecuted because of their faith, ethnicity, culture or way of life, migration to the West has promised safety from hatred, violence and official discrimination.
The foundation of this dream is secular government. Secularism does not mean hostility to religion or the exclusion of religious people from public life. It means that the state itself does not belong to one religion. A secular government protects Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and others under the same law. It asks citizens to obey the Constitution, not to adopt the religion or culture of the majority.
Today, however, a contrary narrative is gaining political power. Leaders and movements in the United States increasingly describe America as a Christian nation. President Donald Trump has promised to defend the “Judeo-Christian principles of our founding” and has declared that America is “one nation under God.” In Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has stated even more directly: “Europe is a Christian continent, and this is how we want to keep it.” He has connected the preservation of this identity with opposition to immigration and the fear that Muslims will transform Europe’s ethnic and cultural composition.
Israel, meanwhile, expressly defines itself as a Jewish state. Its 2018 Nation-State Basic Law declares that Israel is “the nation state of the Jewish People” and that national self-determination in the state is “exclusive to the Jewish People.” It also describes Jewish settlement as a national value. The danger lies not in Judaism—or in Christianity or Islam—but in giving one religious or ethno-religious identity a constitutionally superior relationship with the state.
These declarations must be tested against the constitutional principles that made the West attractive. The U.S. Constitution neither establishes Christianity nor grants it privileged status: the First Amendment prohibits laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” while Article VI bars religious tests for public office. Although the Declaration of Independence refers to a Creator, the Constitution is the governing legal document and protects equal citizenship regardless of belief. Yet the tension persists: a 2024 Pew survey found that 13 percent of Americans supported declaring Christianity the official religion, while 44 percent favored promoting Christian values without formal establishment—a distinction that becomes dangerous when moral advocacy turns into state preference and the exclusion of other faiths.
European Convention on Human Rights. Article 9 guarantees everyone “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” including the freedom to change religion and to manifest belief privately or publicly. The European Court of Human Rights has held that the state must remain a “neutral and impartial” organizer of religious life because pluralism is essential to democracy.
The Magna Carta is often invoked as a symbol of Western liberty and government under law, although it is not a modern constitution or a comprehensive guarantee of religious equality. Its lasting importance is the principle that political authority is subject to law. The modern constitutional descendants of that principle are equal citizenship, due process, religious liberty and protection against arbitrary power. Religious nationalism undermines this inheritance when it divides lawful citizens into authentic members and tolerated outsiders.
The consequences are visible in contemporary politics. During Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York, opponents and online commentators connected his Muslim identity with terrorism, jihad and Sharia. Some called for his denaturalization or deportation, despite the absence of evidence that he intended to impose Islamic law. Mamdani nevertheless won the November 2025 election and became New York City’s first Muslim mayor. His victory affirmed constitutional inclusion, but the reaction exposed how readily a Muslim candidate’s faith could be presented as a security threat.
Michigan politician Abdul El-Sayed has faced similar attempts to associate his Muslim identity with extremism. Dearborn, a city with a large Arab-American and Muslim population, has become a national target for agitators warning about the supposed “Islamification” of America. Yet electing Muslim mayors, council members or police officials is not evidence of religious conquest. It is democracy: citizens exercising the same political rights that the Constitution guarantees to Christians.
Nor is Sharia the governing law of Michigan, New York or any European country. Muslims may voluntarily follow religious principles in their private lives, just as Christians and Jews may consult their own traditions. Civil law nevertheless remains supreme. Raising the specter of Sharia without evidence transforms a religious minority into a permanently suspect population.
The problem is measurable. The U.S. Department of Justice recorded 236 anti-Muslim hate incidents and 156 anti-Sikh incidents in 2023. In the European Union, a survey of almost 10,000 Muslims across 13 countries found that 47 percent had experienced racial discrimination within the preceding five years, particularly in employment and housing.
The same constitutional test must be applied to Israel. Israel emerged from Zionism, British rule in Palestine, European antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust, and the United Nations’ 1947 proposal for separate Arab and Jewish states. It would be historically inaccurate to reduce its creation to a single Western plan for removing Jews from Europe. Nevertheless, defining national self-determination as exclusive to one people raises a profound question about equality for Palestinians and other non-Jewish citizens and residents.
That concern is intensified by occupation and settlement. In a 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that settlement activity must cease. United Nations satellite analysis later estimated that approximately 81 percent of structures in Gaza had been damaged by October 2025.
The conclusion is not that religion must disappear. Religion can inspire compassion, justice and service. The danger begins when it becomes a certificate of citizenship or a weapon for deciding who truly belongs. A Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, Sikh or nonbeliever should not have to become culturally “like” the majority to receive equal protection.
The United States and Europe became dreams because they promised that law would stand above sectarian identity. If their leaders replace that promise with competing religious nationalisms, they will revive the divisions their constitutional systems were designed to restrain. Their future peace and prosperity therefore depend upon returning to the essential principle of secular democracy: the state has no favored faith, and every citizen stands equal before the law.