PrintJanuary 14, 2009
Media and activists ignore horrors when Israel can't be blamed
Perhaps as many as 400,000 people have been killed and some two million driven from their homes since 2003. Are we talking about Gaza? No, it is Darfur and the victims are black Christians and animists in southern Sudan. The culprit? The Arab Islamist government in Khartoum. But where are the street protests against the Islamists? There are none, because the victims are not Palestinian Arabs.
What of the Sri Lankan War in which up to 70,000 Hindus and Buddhists have died since 1983 and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the minority Muslim population have lost their lives while 75,000 others have been driven from their homes. Most people are completely unaware of this long and harrowing war. Can you remember seeing street demonstrations or lurid pictures flashed across your TV screen? The answer is no because they are not Palestinians.
How about the war in the Republic of Congo where since 1997 almost 4,000,000 people have perished? No knowledge of it? Well that's because they weren't Palestinians. Then there's the Somali civil war, which has accounted for 400,000 dead since 1988. Oh, let's not forget, they also are not Palestinians. And before I move on, there's the Mexican drug war currently raging in which nearly 8,000 have died since it began in 2006. But we can ignore that one because they are not Palestinians.
Other wars include the Second Chechen war with up to 90,000 dead; the Islamic insurgency in the Philippines with 160,000 casualties; an ethnic conflict in Nagaland with the loss of 43,000 lives; the Turkish- Kurdish struggle with 37,000 dead and wounded and, last but not least, the Islamic insurgency in Kashmir with another 60,000 lives lost. There are too many others to name but you won't hear much about them because - well yes you guessed it - they are not Palestinians.
Did you hear, during the last eight years, about the 10,000 Palestinian missiles that Hamas and other terror organizations have fired at Israeli villagers and townsfolk from the Gaza Strip? I doubt it, because the victims were Israelis not Palestinians.
Perhaps you have heard about the 6,500 rockets and mortars deliberately aimed at Israeli civilian targets since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005? No? Well, again, that's because the suffering population is in southern Israel, not among the Palestinians. Incidentally, the Israelis left behind a thriving agricultural infrastructure for the Arabs to embrace and for them to prove that they were genuinely interested in living side by side in peace with Israel. But the mainstream media soon forgot that fact.
But consider this. As soon as Israel could no longer bear the Palestinian provocations and finally retaliated, the world strangely woke up and ended its deafening silence.
Predictably the United Nations, orchestrated by the 50 or more members of the Islamic Bloc and, as always, supported by the enfeebled and hypocritical European Union, now fast sliding down into the vile pit called Eurabia, became stridently vocal with condemnations not of Hamas, with its bloodthirsty calls for Israel's destruction, but of the long suffering Israelis for daring to defend themeselves.
How odd that there were no official condemnations of the Hamas regime in Gaza by the U.N. while thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortars were raining down on Israel for years in a gigantic act of premeditated and murderous terror. Sadly, it is symptomatic of much of the world's hypocrisy, pro-Palestinian bias, and dislike of the Jewish state. The world hated the stateless Jews and now hates the State of the Jews.
Israeli civilians can die and be maimed for as long as it takes; but not Palestinians, even if Hamas uses the hapless civilians in Gaza as human shields - an indefensible war crime.
Blatant hypocrisy? You bet.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
