The Deep Hypocrisy In Nitpicking Arab Massacres
Posted By: Groner
on 6/13/2006 6:55:00 PM in
Hypocrisy Hotline
"The recent uproar over the alleged massacre by American soldiers of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha was entirely justified, and vigilant Arab human rights activists should stand alongside their Western counterparts in insisting that, if guilt is confirmed, the perpetrators should be brought to justice and punished. Yet it is disturbing that an Arab world so indignant about the murder of certain people can be so indifferent to that of others.
Massacres of Shiites occur almost daily in Iraq. The death and carnage caused by the huge bombs strategically placed near Shiite mosques and in bustling marketplaces of Shiite-majority areas do receive coverage in both the Western and Arab media. Yet unless the bomb destroys a Shiite shrine, making reference to Shiites unavoidable, the Arab media by and large deliberately leave out the identity of the victims. This is symptomatic of a larger cultural problem: the majority Sunni Arab world's reluctance to identify and extirpate anti-Shiite calumny in its midst.
This is nothing new. Few in the Arab world paid much attention to Saddam Hussein's crimes against Shiites and Kurds, even when they reached genocidal proportions. Some tanks that rolled into southern cities in order to crush the Shiite uprising in 1991 had "No More Shiites After Today" emblazoned on them. Up to 150,000 people died in that campaign. Earlier, Saddam had responded to a Kurdish rebellion by launching the genocidal Anfal operations in 1988, where an estimated 180,000 civilians were slaughtered. Separately, the Iraqi Air Force sprayed the Kurdish village of Halabja with poison gas; 5,000 villagers perished while most Arabs remained cruelly indifferent. Now, however, everyone is aghast at the brutality of American soldiers.
The Lebanese have long been familiar with this sort of duplicity, which in their country manifests itself in the selective commemoration of Civil War-era massacres. For years, convention has dictated that the only crimes afforded official recognition should be those committed by, or involving, Israel. The most notorious of these was the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians in September 1982. But this approach is selective.
To begin with, massacres committed by Palestinian militias (Damour, Chekka, and others) have been all but forgotten; the Lebanese Christian victims of these outrages are alone in commemorating them. But there is another twist to the macabre legacy of Civil War crimes, for even those massacres in which Palestinians fell victim to Christian militias (Karantina, Tell al-Zaatar) have been deliberately ignored in favor of focusing all attention on Sabra and Shatila. As if that weren't hypocritical enough, the principal Lebanese role in the slaughter has been officially overlooked, while the involvement of the Israelis, who were surely facilitators, has been made to appear central.
Palestinian suffering at the hands of other Lebanese groups has similarly been relegated to obscurity. During the "war of the camps" between Shiite and Palestinian militias in the mid-1980s, the Amal movement laid waste to several Palestinian refugee camps. This is no longer mentioned, and hasn't prevented Amal representatives from turning up at commemorations for the victims of the Sabra and Shatila killings.
What accounts for such willful blindness? Politics. It is politically incorrect to blame powerful Lebanese political parties and figures for their crimes. It is "traitorous" to blame Palestinians, who are the victims of Zionism, for anything. The argument is, Why antagonize this or that community? Political expediency invariably trumps human rights as well as the memory of many of those who lost their life in the violence.
And so it is in Iraq, where those who subordinate the value of human life to politics have pointedly ignored all massacres except those committed by American soldiers. In the Iraqi case, however, such cynical manipulation has been further exacerbated by the Arab world's refusal to confront Sunni extremism. Two Sundays ago, a bus north of Baghdad was stopped by gunmen, who forced the occupants to disembark. The gunmen proceeded to separate the terrified civilians on the basis of their religious and ethnic affiliation. Then the slaughter began: 19 Shiite Turkmen and two Kurds were murdered, while four Sunni Arabs were spared. According to a witness, the terrorists informed their victims that they intended to murder them "in the name of Islam" for being "traitors."
These details were carried by the wire services, which gathered information from witness accounts. Yet when the same story was covered by the Arab satellite news channels, no mention was made of the identities of the victims or the perpetrators, and no inkling was given as to the reason for such carnage. The sly insinuation would seem to have been that this was just another episode of mindless violence, not an instance of targeted killing. Even more galling, the articles posted on the Web sites of the Arab satellite channels cited the wire services as their source for the story, but Web editors had quietly removed all references to the victims' identity contained in the original wire reports.
The same day that this sectarian massacre took place, Arab media reported on a battle in and around a Sunni mosque in Basra. No media outlet shied away from identifying the mosque as Sunni, or from pointing out that Shiite militias dominate the southern port city and have infiltrated the security services. Claims by the mosque's imam and the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Clerics that the assault unfairly targeted the Sunni community, and that those killed were not terrorists, as alleged by the largely Shiite security services, were widely reported.
This mendacious selectivity in reporting murder and its culprits will continue so long as human suffering is viewed exploitatively by Arabs as something that can be harnessed for political purposes. A massacre is a massacre, whether it is perpetrated by Palestinians or Israelis, Shiites or Sunnis, Kurds or Arabs. No massacre is more important than another, or more worthy of coverage. The Haditha massacre should be investigated and those guilty punished, but let us not allow it to become yet more grist for the mill of hypocrisy that powers Arab political culture." (Rayyan al-Shawaf/DailyStar.com 6/14/06)
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COMMENTS
Where Is The Outrage?
Posted
By: 
Groner
on 6/24/2006 3:14:57 PM
E.D. Hill, on FOX & Friends asks "Where's the outrage?"
The Murdered Soldiers: A Time for Rage
"NEWSMAX --The biblical book of Ecclesiastes tells us tells us there's a time for everything, including "a time to love and a time to hate ... a time for war and a time for peace."
There is also a time for rage, and in this time of war that time is now.
The bodies of two courageous U.S. soldiers, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker, were found Monday, and, according to CNN reports, "mutilated and booby-trapped." They had been so horribly mutilated, with their eyes gouged out and their remains so desecrated, a visual identification was impossible – DNA testing was needed in order to confirm their identities. CNN also reported that not only were the bodies booby-trapped, but homemade bombs also lined the road leading to the victims, an apparent effort to complicate recovery efforts and kill recovery teams.
That story makes my blood boil – and it should make yours reach the boiling point too. More than anything else in the recent events in Iraq, this horrific outrage demonstrates with awful clarity the kind of depraved monsters we are facing in the war on terrorism.
It also shows why they must be eliminated from the face of the earth. They are a species with which civilized mankind cannot co-exist. During the Civil War, when Gen. T.J. (Stonewall) Jackson was asked how to deal with the enemy, he had a simple answer: "Kill 'em; kill 'em all."
The hideous torture and killing of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker should tell us that it's time to adopt Jackson's strategy as our own. Their deaths are proof that we face an enemy that will never cut and run, but will lurk in the shadows and strike out against us at every opportunity until they have been wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing else can guarantee the safety of the American people.
Incredibly, in some quarters, instead of provoking rage – and a firm and renewed determination to prevail in the war against Islamofascist terrorism no matter how long it takes – this unspeakable outrage has been seized upon as an opportunity to make political capital out of a disaster of mammoth proportions.
The anti-war left in the Democrat party and the Bush haters in much of the mainstream media have been shameless in their reaction to the deaths of these two brave men.
How many relatives, for example, did NBC News have to canvass before they found a kin of Pfc. Menchaca who would take the occasion of his relative's murder to express his anti-administration views? NBC's "Today" show found Ken MacKenzie, Menchaca's uncle, who obligingly told NBC, "Because the U.S. government did not have a plan in place, my nephew has paid for it with his life." He added that the government should have offered a $100 million reward and offered to exchange mujahideen detainees for the soldiers' lives. It seized enough money from Saddam Hussein to afford it, he said.
He had nothing to say about the brutes who murdered his nephew, and he expressed no anger at them.
The Democrats all but jumped for joy over the sleazy opportunity they saw to exploit the soldiers' deaths for their political purposes. Listen to Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin's comment that the discovery of the two mutilated soldiers' bodies is a "grim reminder of the price we're paying for a failed policy in Iraq."
Like McKenzie, he didn't bother to direct his anger at the fiends who committed the atrocity.
Nor did he or any of his anti-war Democrat colleagues bother to note that the so-called "failed policy" in Iraq has produced 5 million Iraqi children inoculated since the U.S went into Iraq, any number of schools and hospitals have been built, 32,000 teachers have been trained, 20 million Iraqis now have clean water – all the positive things they and the media studiously ignore.
Now instead of the rage they should feel, these white-flag-waving Democrats are demanding that the U.S. set some sort of timetable for withdrawal, ignoring the fact that such an act would be a signal to the al-Qaida butchers to be patient and hang in there and wait for the U.S. to cut and run.
Have they no shame?" (Michael Reagan/NewsMax.com 6/23/06)
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