Comparative Treatment

There was a very good argument put forth by famed British journalist Robert Fisk on Monday July 31 as he was speaking on Democracy Now. He spoke about the IRA in Northern Ireland and the way they were treated by the British. As we know the British did not carpet bomb Northern Ireland in order to remove the IRA.

If the British had cluster bombed, and used white phosphorus bombs, and destroyed entire cities and villages in Northern Ireland to root out the IRA, the outcry from the world community would have been deafening. The picture of an Irish youth with burns right to her bone would not be tolerated, we would call the British crazed barbarians. So many innocent attractive Irish civilians, children, women, the elderly, all subjected to the potential of dying as a result of bombing.

Can you imagine Rush and Coulter ranting about how the Northern Ireland youth were just pawns of the IRA and so their deaths would somehow not count.

Yet the leadership of the US appears to have given Israel carte blanche approval to carry out the exact same type of treatment of the civilian population of Lebanon in order to remove Hezbollah. Why can this be tolerated and when we exchange the names and places with the IRA and Northern Ireland, this could not possibly be tolerated? But the ranting does go on.

Is it actually necessary to state the obvious that people are people? All share the same desire to be happy and live relatively peacefully. Many can mentally exclude terrorists from this, but civilians?

Ten to fifteen percent of the Lebanese in southern Lebanon are involved with Hezbollah. This is perhaps the same percentage of people in the US who are involved with Evangelical Christianity.

Is it actually necessary to state the obvious in that a brutal death to a close loved one or loved ones, does not seem to create an atmosphere of open appreciation for those doing the killing. In other words look to see Hezbollah become strengthened from the civilian population that is suffering the effect of war.

painting by Mark Tansey