Some 50 civilians were killed in another artillery shelling today.
The world is yawning.
The civilians weren’t palestinians.
They weren’t Iraqis.
They weren’t killed by Israel.
They weren’t killed by the U.S.
It was just a bunch of civilians in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka? What country is that, anyway? Where is it, even?
Sri Lankan forces bombarding rebels with artillery on Wednesday hit a school where scores of civilians had taken refuge from the fighting, killing at least 45 Tamils and wounding 125 others in the country’s east, a senior rebel official said.
The government accused the Tamil Tiger rebels of using civilians as human shields, and said its forces were only retaliating against intense rebel shelling.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Kofi Annan to be “shocked” at the killings.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for UN condemnation of the Sri Lankan government.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the EU to call on the Sri Lankan government to “exercise restraint.”
Don’t hold your breath waiting for world leaders to condemn this attack.
You won’t hear a peep. You have to dig deeply to find the paltry 141 stories on Google News when I wrote this post.
There are currently 2,026 articles about the Israeli artillery shell that went astray.
The Guardian managed two whole paragraphs on the Sri Lanka massacre. Here’s one of them:
It was the second worst incident involving civilians since a putative ceasefire in 2002, while foreign monitors say that, in all, 1,076 civilians have been killed since early this year. Last month a rebel suicide bomber rammed a military convoy, killing 95 sailors.
Funny, all those civilians killed this year in Sri Lanka, and you just never hear about it much. Two paragraphs in the Guardian. They did far more for the Gaza incident. The Guardian managed to put up several articles about the Gaza incident.
Where are the UN calls to stop the killing of civilians in Sri Lanka? Where are the UN calls to exercise restraint? Where are the Page One stories in the New York Times, the LA Times, Time, and Newsweek?
Nowhere.
But don’t expect anything to change. Hundreds of thousands dead in Darfur, and the UN can’t even vote to send peacekeeping forces. Yet there are new UNIFIL forces in Lebanon, turning a blind eye to the rebuilding of Hezbullah’s army. And there will be a condemnation of Israel for accidentally killing 18 palestinian noncombatants.
The reason you’ll hear nothing about this incident? It’s because every day is Israeli Double Standard Time. And remember, all that criticism of Israel and none of other states that indiscriminately fire in civilian-filled schools? It’s not singling out Israel for special treatment. It’s just our imagination.
Are you saying that the world dooesn’t care about Tamils ? You may be right.
No, I’m not saying anything in support of the Tamils.
I’m saying that when civilians are killed anywhere but in Israel or where the U.S. Army happens to be, the world does not care. It’s only when Israeli or U.S. shells go awry that the world freaks out over the death of civilians.
Millions can die in Africa or Asia but if a Palestinian feels bad because the line in the checkpoint was too long, it\’s a BBC \\New York Times story
the coverage of the Arab war against Israel using Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs as proxies has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with propoganda aimed against Israel and America
Millions can die in Africa or Asia but if a Palestinian feels bad because the line in the checkpoint was too long, it\’s a BBC \\New York Times story
the coverage of the Arab war against Israel using Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs as proxies has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with propaganda aimed against Israel and America
First reason for the double standard is plain, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. And none of this nonsense about “we’re only anti-Israel, not anti-Semites.” That’s a distinction without a difference.
There is, however, another reason for the double standard: Israel and the United States, as liberal democracies, are held to higher standards. Or so it is claimed.
But isn’t this either a) the racism of lowered expectations for Sri Lankans, Arabs, and others, or b) expressing post-colonial white guilt? Or some of both?
Given the nature of the bile and hatred against Israel and America, I think that Occam’s Razor should be applied — the simplest explanation to fit the facts on the ground.
And that is, simply, anti-Semitism in the case of Israel, and, as we just saw in Gaza, including Americans in the crosshairs since we support Israel.