Monday, August 07, 2006

Let's Hear It For World Opinion!

A Barbaric Yawp brings a trenchant piece by Dennis Prager on the apathy of World Opinion:
World opinion has little or nothing to say about the world’s greatest evils and regularly condemns those who fight evil.
To prove his point, Prager gives a list of historical atrocities during which the world remained silent, including:
...the 6 million Ukrainians slaughtered by Stalin;
or the tens of millions of other Soviet citizens killed by Stalin’s Soviet Union;
or the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their helpers throughout Europe;
or the 60 million Chinese butchered by Mao;
But where Prager talks of apathy painting in broad strokes, Elder of Ziyon focuses on a much smaller example, speaking of the hypocrisy of world opinion in the death of 3 children:
Last Thursday, 3 Palestinian Arab kids were shot to death in Jenin.

For reasons that are unclear, there was no international outcry. Their deaths were barely mentioned in the newspapers. There were no UN condemnations, no shows of anguish from the EU, no peace protesters demonstrating, no pictures of crying mothers in the Reuters wire photos, no huge funerals demanding justice.
The lack of international outcry is all the more puzzling, given the well-documented concern of World Opinion for the death of Palestinians--especially the children--due to the indescriminate use of Israeli force. Unfortunately, the reason for international complacency are very clear. This time Israeli is not to blame--instead, the 3 children were killed when an armed Palestinian gunman lost control of his assault rifle. It seems that concern for Palestinian lives only goes so far:
People only care about dead Palestinian kids when they can blame Jews for their deaths.
According to Elder of Ziyon, there have been 46 Palestinian lives lost at the hands of other Palestinians. And the silence of the many friends and allies of Palestinian Arabs in the West is deafening.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the Link.

Yawp!