When Iraq occupied Kuwait, all out assault was launched within months.
Israel continues to occupy lands for decades and brazenly keeps committing land theft in addition to mowing the lawn on a regular basis in violation of the international laws. US obediently keeps shielding it from the law with the UN Security Council vetos. Something very disproproportionate there indeed.
Even this Israeli newspaper is amused at this history of slavery on the part of the US govt.: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-17/ty-article/.p...
And US violates its own law in donating this huge pile of murder weapons to this occupying party: Section 502B(a)(2) (22 U.S.C. 2304(a)(2)) stipulates that "no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/IF11197.pdf
B'tSalem/HRW/Amnesty have voluminous records of the said violations.
Indeed, there is some theocratic elements[0-2] in what drives the pogrom and extermination of a people through periodically “mowing the lawn” and sustained land theft at massive scale.
You are responsible for your own actions (or the predictable consequences thereof) — that’s the basic rule at play here. Any normal court would deem providing murder weapons to the murderer and shielding the murderer from the law an offense.
US taxpayers are privy to knowing what they are sponsoring with their tax dollars. The newspapers are supposed to be part of that process.
In the case of butchering Palestinians, unlike the others, key elements are US murder weapons (material assistance) and Vetos at UN SC to shield from international consequences.
An US newspaper has naturally extra newsworthiness in that. No less than they had with “collateral murder” video (cf. Wikileaks).
Sanders probably isn’t saying that the US is identical to Russia. But the oligarchic nature in terms of policy preferences and influence when it comes to governance in the US seems to be a settled issue, per the 2014 landmark study [0].
Also unsurprising in view of even more egregious incidents from the past:
Shai Masot, the Israeli embassy official at London, caught on camera in 2017 talking about 'hitlist' of members of parliament, including Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan, a vocal supporter of Palestinian state [0]. And that led to a slap on the wrist.
A comparison of reactions to related incidents involving different parties is revealing [1].
The real cases are not much different. In the backdrop of invading a country thousands of miles away on a false pretext, the American Sniper story is a window into that[0]:
“Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq,” he writes after describing his first kill, a woman who walked into a street with a grenade in her hand as marines advanced into her village. After a moment’s hesitation, he drops her with a shot.
“That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages,’” he writes of this scene. “There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.”
Beside the bipartisan powers-that-be in the US government, the media landscape is obsequious and willing participant too; see 'peace propaganda and the promised land (2004)' [0]. For instance, it didn't make it to the Paper of Record's newsworthiness that the NSA shares, per the Snowden revelations, US citizen's data with Israel [1][2]; to their credit, though, they lightly lament at occasionally getting used as an accessory to the war machine, outside the traditional route [3].
The following part from [0] seems relevant a bit too:
In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis.
Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her 'Triumph of the Will' that reputedly cast Hitler's spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the "messages" in her films were dependent not on "orders from above" but on a "submissive void" in the German population. "Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked.
"Everyone," she replied, "and of course the intelligentsia."
This seems to be a thoughtfully critical take on it:
... This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more "moderation in democracy" to mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis.
...
The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special interests," a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on-in short, the general population. In the U.S. presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national interest," tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.