The following is an excerpt from a recent editorial in The Economist urging for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, an event that happened on the following day.
Before I sleep every night, I read about 3-4 news articles and the sites vary from day to day, all of them western newspapers. One is no longer surprised to find such glib language used with great facility to buttress the most ridiculous of arguments across respectable journalists in the west. It seems a pathological condition, a self-deception of an unprecedented kind in supposedly freethinking democracies - something that would have surprised Orwell himself. But it ceases to be funny when you remember that lives cannot be lumped in multiples of thousand. It is beyond belief that in a country where popular public discourse is so often conscious to the inherited "Judeo-Christian" values, it is so very difficult to find a voice in the popular media who opposes these west-supported invasions as 'morally outrageous' and not simply 'politically imprudent'. The article ends:
Some expedient reason to stop mass murder, isn't it?
Some of the hypocrisy in the Arab world is unspeakable. Syria, for example, is one country to accuse Israel of “genocide”. But in 1982, when Syria’s own Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in the Syrian city of Hama, the regime responded by shelling the city indiscriminately for three weeks, killing about 20,000 or 30,000 civilians. In Gaza Israel has killed 1,000 people. It is not playing by Hama rules, let alone committing genocide. Russia’s onslaught on the Chechen city of Grozny in the mid-1990s is reckoned to have killed some 20,000 civilians. As for Hamas itself, it deliberately murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants in the intifada of 2001-03.
Before I sleep every night, I read about 3-4 news articles and the sites vary from day to day, all of them western newspapers. One is no longer surprised to find such glib language used with great facility to buttress the most ridiculous of arguments across respectable journalists in the west. It seems a pathological condition, a self-deception of an unprecedented kind in supposedly freethinking democracies - something that would have surprised Orwell himself. But it ceases to be funny when you remember that lives cannot be lumped in multiples of thousand. It is beyond belief that in a country where popular public discourse is so often conscious to the inherited "Judeo-Christian" values, it is so very difficult to find a voice in the popular media who opposes these west-supported invasions as 'morally outrageous' and not simply 'politically imprudent'. The article ends:
For Israel, however, the sword alone will never be enough. A small country with many foes cannot afford to become a pariah. And Israel has a particular reason to avoid killing civilians, since the people it is bombing are the neighbors with whom it so much needs to live in peace.
Some expedient reason to stop mass murder, isn't it?
3 comments:
I am yet to talk with american people on this. The only person I've talked about this was one of my old room mates. He's surprisingly pro-Palestine, incidentally he's also Jewish.
So is Noam Chomsky. There might be a pattern there :-). Which of your old roommates is this?
He's huge, fat and bearded. Nothing like Chomsky :P
His name is Stuart
Post a Comment