It's so fucking funny.
Supposedly, the older you get, the more right-wing you become. It's strange then that at least when it comes to foreign policy, the more I age, the more to the left I shift. Perhaps it's because the propaganda accompanying those shilling for war becomes ever more egregious; maybe it's because those selling leaden death are about as plausible as a pig dressed as a chicken; or it could be that as my anger on much else has dimmed, and boy has it dimmed, if anything it still hasn't peaked when civilians are massacred by the "most moral" army on the planet, supported and backed to the hilt by our own wannabe bombers.
We must start though with the shooting down of flight MH17. Here is the worst example imaginable of what happens when you give heavy weaponry to amateurs, or as could be the case, when professionals are made to answer to dilettantes. As soon as the news emerged a civilian plane had came down in the area where the eastern Ukrainian rebels have been pushed back to it was apparent what had happened. Regardless of how the Donetsk People's Republic fighters got their hands on a Buk, whether supplied directly by Russia or captured from the Ukrainians, they couldn't have kept fighting this long without the tacit, barely disguised support of Putin. He bears a heavy responsibility for the tragedy, and the fact he either refused or failed to pressure the rebels into allowing immediate access to the crash site so investigators could carry out their work speaks of the inhumanity of the Russian president.
This said, there is little many in the west like more than the certainty of past battles. To hear some commentators and politicians over the last few days you could be forgiven for imagining the Russians themselves had carried out the most heinous, despicable atrocity of recent times. The strike on MH17 apparently occurred in a vacuum, few of the reports setting out how the Ukrainians had carried out air strikes in the area before last Thursday, at least one missile destroying a house and killing those inside. Nor have there been such shootings down in the past, it would seem, neither the Korean flight brought down by the Soviets in 1983 or indeed the USS Vincennes incident of 1988 being recalled.
Those quite rightly demanding justice and the handing over of those responsible might well reflect on the punishment given to the US navy crew whom unintentionally killed 290 civilians on Iran Air Flight 655: they received their medals, while the captain got the Legion of Merit. Few have considered the irony either of the media traipsing all over what would normally be a crime scene, access carefully controlled so as not to lose evidence or contaminate the area. Indeed, if the scene had been quickly handed over to investigators, it's possible the bodies of the victims could have stayed where they landed just as long if not longer than they did; that was certainly the case with Lockerbie.
Watching last Friday's session at the United Nations Security Council was an instruction in how diplomacy does and doesn't work. The anger of US ambassador Samantha Power was palpable, her words at times mawkish. "We now all know the letter I stands for infant," she said. It doesn't of course when it comes to Gaza, where instead it must stand for irrelevant. If the same politicians who have barely been able to contain their contempt and rage at Russia over MH17 directed even a tenth of that feeling at Israel, the pressure would have almost certainly already told on Netanyahu.
Israel instead is held to different standards, always has been, always will be. "No one understands Israel but Israel," as the Israeli prime minister apparently told John Kerry. It's the story taken up by apologists, as well as those who don't bother to sugar the pill. When we highlight the disparity in the number of casualties between the two sides, the context is we want more Israelis to be killed to even things up. It's also extremely distasteful to share pictures of dead children, because doing so "devalues the currency of shared humanity", while if we do it for the Palestinians, we should also do it for the children of every other conflict or disaster. God forbid that we see the victims of a war where one side has rudimentary rockets and rifles and the other has tanks and the finest weaponry the west can supply.
If it wasn't apparently designed to infuriate, the IDF Twitter account could be taken for satire. We're told the ground invasion is to destroy the tunnels Hamas hides its missiles in, but they conceal them in every civilian building too. Israel is threatened by Hamas fighters using the tunnels to attack settlements just outside the Strip, despite them being obliterated the moment they step out of them, yet when Hamas kills Israeli soldiers inside Gaza they're still terrorists, rather than resisting an invading force. The media can't repeat enough the great lengths the IDF goes to avoid civilian casualties, despite multiple incidents every day that suggest at best either lack of care or at worst a complete indifference, yet similar statements from Hamas never make the cut. When civilians don't leave despite being warned to flee, they're either human shields or Hamas wouldn't let them go. That nowhere in Gaza is safe doesn't matter. Hamas is responsible.
We've heard it all before, and no doubt we'll hear it again. One thing we do seem to have been spared this time is the Palestinians don't feel pain such is their martyrdom ideation line, perhaps because the grieving for those killed has been there for all to see. So too we've seen more reports from the "Sderot cinema" or other vantage points where an extreme, tiny minority of Israelis go to watch the carnage being wreaked on Gaza, cheering it on, just as vengeful and filled with hate as we're so often informed Palestinian children are brought up to be. Whether they really approve of the horrific consequences on the ground, when 19 children were killed in a single strike, apparently just as guilty as the solitary target, we can't know. They surely however demand justice just as much as the infants on board the MH17 did.
We must start though with the shooting down of flight MH17. Here is the worst example imaginable of what happens when you give heavy weaponry to amateurs, or as could be the case, when professionals are made to answer to dilettantes. As soon as the news emerged a civilian plane had came down in the area where the eastern Ukrainian rebels have been pushed back to it was apparent what had happened. Regardless of how the Donetsk People's Republic fighters got their hands on a Buk, whether supplied directly by Russia or captured from the Ukrainians, they couldn't have kept fighting this long without the tacit, barely disguised support of Putin. He bears a heavy responsibility for the tragedy, and the fact he either refused or failed to pressure the rebels into allowing immediate access to the crash site so investigators could carry out their work speaks of the inhumanity of the Russian president.
This said, there is little many in the west like more than the certainty of past battles. To hear some commentators and politicians over the last few days you could be forgiven for imagining the Russians themselves had carried out the most heinous, despicable atrocity of recent times. The strike on MH17 apparently occurred in a vacuum, few of the reports setting out how the Ukrainians had carried out air strikes in the area before last Thursday, at least one missile destroying a house and killing those inside. Nor have there been such shootings down in the past, it would seem, neither the Korean flight brought down by the Soviets in 1983 or indeed the USS Vincennes incident of 1988 being recalled.
Those quite rightly demanding justice and the handing over of those responsible might well reflect on the punishment given to the US navy crew whom unintentionally killed 290 civilians on Iran Air Flight 655: they received their medals, while the captain got the Legion of Merit. Few have considered the irony either of the media traipsing all over what would normally be a crime scene, access carefully controlled so as not to lose evidence or contaminate the area. Indeed, if the scene had been quickly handed over to investigators, it's possible the bodies of the victims could have stayed where they landed just as long if not longer than they did; that was certainly the case with Lockerbie.
Watching last Friday's session at the United Nations Security Council was an instruction in how diplomacy does and doesn't work. The anger of US ambassador Samantha Power was palpable, her words at times mawkish. "We now all know the letter I stands for infant," she said. It doesn't of course when it comes to Gaza, where instead it must stand for irrelevant. If the same politicians who have barely been able to contain their contempt and rage at Russia over MH17 directed even a tenth of that feeling at Israel, the pressure would have almost certainly already told on Netanyahu.
Israel instead is held to different standards, always has been, always will be. "No one understands Israel but Israel," as the Israeli prime minister apparently told John Kerry. It's the story taken up by apologists, as well as those who don't bother to sugar the pill. When we highlight the disparity in the number of casualties between the two sides, the context is we want more Israelis to be killed to even things up. It's also extremely distasteful to share pictures of dead children, because doing so "devalues the currency of shared humanity", while if we do it for the Palestinians, we should also do it for the children of every other conflict or disaster. God forbid that we see the victims of a war where one side has rudimentary rockets and rifles and the other has tanks and the finest weaponry the west can supply.
If it wasn't apparently designed to infuriate, the IDF Twitter account could be taken for satire. We're told the ground invasion is to destroy the tunnels Hamas hides its missiles in, but they conceal them in every civilian building too. Israel is threatened by Hamas fighters using the tunnels to attack settlements just outside the Strip, despite them being obliterated the moment they step out of them, yet when Hamas kills Israeli soldiers inside Gaza they're still terrorists, rather than resisting an invading force. The media can't repeat enough the great lengths the IDF goes to avoid civilian casualties, despite multiple incidents every day that suggest at best either lack of care or at worst a complete indifference, yet similar statements from Hamas never make the cut. When civilians don't leave despite being warned to flee, they're either human shields or Hamas wouldn't let them go. That nowhere in Gaza is safe doesn't matter. Hamas is responsible.
We've heard it all before, and no doubt we'll hear it again. One thing we do seem to have been spared this time is the Palestinians don't feel pain such is their martyrdom ideation line, perhaps because the grieving for those killed has been there for all to see. So too we've seen more reports from the "Sderot cinema" or other vantage points where an extreme, tiny minority of Israelis go to watch the carnage being wreaked on Gaza, cheering it on, just as vengeful and filled with hate as we're so often informed Palestinian children are brought up to be. Whether they really approve of the horrific consequences on the ground, when 19 children were killed in a single strike, apparently just as guilty as the solitary target, we can't know. They surely however demand justice just as much as the infants on board the MH17 did.
Labels: Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza, GazaUnderAttack, Hamas, Israel, Israel-Palestine, John Kerry, MH17, Palestine, politics, Russia, Ukraine, US foreign policy
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