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The hypocrisy of the west is beyond belief
(Peter Kilfoyle, The Guardian, March 16, 2004)
We see the Palestinian suicide bomber as a terrorist - but not Sharon, the overseer of the massacres of Shatila and Sabra. We abhor the killers of Omagh, but not yet those of Bloody Sunday. We rightly condemn the killing fields of Pol Pot, but not the murderous attacks of Nixon and Kissinger. To many in the third world, the hypocrisy of the west is beyond belief. . . . Remember that al-Qaida's original "mission" was to expel the communist-atheists from Afghanistan; get the Americans out of Saudi Arabia; and return the Palestinians to what is now Israel. We have now added the cause of Iraq to its prospectus. . . . Where does that leave the British government? Tony Blair must look at the Spanish election result and wonder. The Madrid atrocities appear to have aroused the deep reservations that Spaniards had about the war in Iraq. Their doubts were overlaid with a distrust of a government that precipitately sought to lay blame for the bombing at the door of Eta, for political advantage. . . . We are renowned as a phlegmatic people, but we are not forgiving to those who let the side down, whether at home or abroad. If such an attack were to take place here, the question would inevitably be whether our support for America's war against Iraq had made it more likely. . . . The prime minister in particular will now ruminate on this. If ever there was a case of an individual driving the nation into a war then it was him. People will inevitably link his personal crusade to any failure to forestall terrorist outrages. Thus the stakes for him have increased alarmingly. . . . The danger is that, in order to pre-empt the kind of hellish scenes witnessed in Madrid, the prime minister and his cabinet will crack down even harder on civil liberties than they have already. That creates political perils of its own, without any guarantee of achieving the desired end. A case of heads the prime minister loses, and tails his opponents win.

posted by Lorenzo 4:29 PM