Little Green Footballs has busted Reuters for cropping out an “activist’s” knife from a photo taken on board the Mavi Marmara. The original photo, published by Turkey’s Hurriyet (and, to their credit, by AP) clearly shows one of a group of “activists” standing over a wounded Israeli soldier (in the lower right corner of the [...]
Dead Palestinians Only Matter If Killed By Israel
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I recently posted about an incident in Gaza where Palestinians clashed with one another, resulting in 28 Palestinians killed and more than 120 wounded.
Tim Marshall, the foreign affairs editor at Sky News, took an obvious, but always interesting, perspective on this story when he recently blogged about the double standard that exists in which dead Palestinians are only mourned when they are killed by Israelis, but when killed by other Palestinians no one could really care less.
He writes:
Thirty Palestinians killed. Women and children caught in the crossfire. Missiles fired at a Mosque. Muslim prisoners ‘executed’ in cold blood. A massacre. Media restrictions.
A familiar tale? Indeed. International outrage and demonstrations in the streets of London? Nope.
And why might that be? Why it’s simple. The Palestinians were were killed by Palestinians and, it would appear from the lack of reaction that in those circumstances their lives are cheap, but when they are killed by Israelis it is an outrage.
On August 15th Hamas militiamen attacked a Mosque in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Inside were extremists from the Jund Ansar Allah group (JAA). JAA were so extreme they viewed Hamas almost as liberals.
They had declared Gaza an Islamic state and challenged Hamas to enter the Mosque. ‘No problem’ said Hamas.
In the assault Hamas desecrated holy ground, firing rocket and after rocket at the Mosque, some hit surrounding houses. It would be reasonable to assume that at least one Holy Koran may have been damaged.
After they took the building they rounded up the survivors. Mobile phone footage shows what appears to be Hamas men ‘executing’ some of them…
I put ‘executed’ in quotation marks as in this context, ie, the killing of someone, it is a legal term. But in the context of what Hamas did, perhaps it should be substituted for murdered.
And where is the outrage about these murders. The marches, the petitions, the calls for a boycott, the conspiracy theory of a war against Muslims, ad infinitum? I hear just the wind blowing across the freshly dug graves. Because unless the Israelis kill them, people don’t care.
Journalist Tom Gross also comments about this incident on his site:
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have yet to publish reports about the bloody events, even though Palestinian women and children were among those killed by Hamas. 120 Palestinians were also injured, some severely.
Despite the disturbing eyewitness accounts, the UN Security Council did not meet to condemn the alleged massacre.
Sweden, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, did not even bother to comment on it.
As leading Palestinian journalist (and longtime subscriber to this email list) Khaled Abu Toameh notes: “As far as the mainstream media in the U.S. and Europe is concerned, an Israeli soldier who, for example, confiscates a mobile phone from a Palestinian at a checkpoint is more important than a story on the death of 30 Palestinians and the wounding of more than 120 others.”