Permalink: https://revcom.us/en/iwd-us-rulers-honor-women-and-girls-iran-giving-them-award-named-war-criminal
On March 8, as the world celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD), First Lady Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a ceremony at the White House to mark International Women’s Day and bestow a special honor on the women and girls of Iran for their “exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equity and equality, often at great personal risk and sacrifice.”
The award? The inaugural Madeleine K. Albright Honorary Group International Women of Courage Award for 2023.
Say what??!!
The late Madeleine Albright was a U.S. Ambassador to the UN and the U.S. Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton. And she was a world-class war criminal who dripped with the blood of the people of the world from every pore. Albright upheld, promoted and facilitated America’s savage 1990-2003 “sanctions” against Iraq, which should more properly be called economic warfare. These sanctions, according to the UN, killed over 500,000 children and hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis. When asked if that price was worth it to advance U.S. imperialist interests, she said, with the coldness of a gangster, “The price was worth it.”
She sought to advance U.S. imperialism’s domination of the Middle East, including its support for the genocidal settler-colonial state of Israel. She championed going to war in Kosovo in the 1990s to further U.S. dominance in Europe. And the list could go on and on.
Do the courageous women and girls of Iran deserve to be tarred with such an “award”? Of course not!
But is it fitting for the U.S. imperialists to name their awards after war criminals and those who’ve carried out towering crimes against humanity? Of course it is!! Because that’s what they—Republicans and Democrats—and the capitalist-imperialist system they rule are all about!
This should be an object lesson for all the Iranians who hope that somehow the U.S. can come to their aid and be a force for good in Iran: these are people who honor mass murderers, and when you deal with them, that’s what you get: mass murdering oppressors!