www.aljazeerah.info
Opinion Editorials, February 2012
Archives
Mission & Name
Conflict Terminology
Editorials
Gaza Holocaust
Gulf War
Isdood
Islam
News
News Photos
Opinion Editorials
US Foreign Policy (Dr. El-Najjar's Articles)
www.aljazeerah.info
Britain and United States Condemn Murder in Syria But Condone Murder in Palestine
By Alan Hart
Redress, Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, February 13, 2012
Alan Hart views US and British hypocrisy in condemning Russia’s and China’s veto of the Security Council resolution to end the killing in Syria while at the same time supporting “Israel right or wrong – unending occupation, ongoing ethnic cleansing and all”.
***
Arising out the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, the Nobel Prize is universally recognized as the most prestigious award in the fields of peace-making, economics, chemistry, physics, medicine and literature. How about an international award – without the gold medal, the diploma and the money – for hypocrisy?
Such an award could be called the Lebon Prize (reversing Nobel).
|
If there was such an award, the statements of European and American
leaders in the immediate aftermath of Russia and China’s veto of the
Security Council resolution to end the killing in Syria suggest two most
obvious nominees for it.
One is William Hague, Britain’s foreign
secretary.
In the House of Commons he pronounced Bashar al-Assad’s
regime to be “doomed” because there is “no way it can recover its
credibility”. That may very well be the case in the long term, but in my
view that Hague statement was somewhat naive at the time he made it. For its
short- to medium-term survival at the time of writing, and unless visiting
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is seeking to engineer Bashar
al-Assad’s departure from office in a face-saving way that will protect
Russia’s interests, the Syrian regime doesn’t need credibility in the
outside world. It needs only enough weapons and the will to go on killing
its own people. (That said there can be no doubt that Bashar al-Assad and/or
his Alawite generals took the Russian and Chinese vetoes as a green light to
escalate the killing. Also to be noted is that Bashar al-Assad was not the
only Arab leader to draw a particular conclusion from Mubarak’s downfall.
“If our people take to the streets demanding regime change, shoot them!”)
But the particular Hague statement that prompts my suggestion that he be nominated for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy was this one. By exercising their veto “Russia and China have placed themselves on the wrong side of Arab and international opinion.”
The obvious implication is that it’s not good politics and policy to be
on the wrong side of that opinion. Really? Then how do we explain the fact
that all the governments of the Western world, led by America, are on the
wrong side of it because of their support for the Zionist state of Israel
right or wrong – unending occupation, ongoing ethnic cleansing and all?
There is a one-word answer. Hypocrisy.
Hague also condemned China and
Russia for “betraying the Syrian people”. It apparently doesn’t matter that
the British and all other Western governments have been betraying the
Palestinians for decades. There really is no end and no limit to the
hypocrisy.
The second most obvious nominee for a Lebon Prize for
hypocrisy is Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN. In condemning the
Russian and Chinese vetoes, she said, “For months this council has been held
hostage by a couple of members.”
Given that for the Security Council
has been held hostage for decades by American vetoes to protect Israel from
being called to account for its crimes, that Rice statement is – what I can
say without resorting to use of the “F” word? – hypocrisy most naked and
taken to its highest level
No doubt readers will have other
suggestions, probably many, for nominations for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy.
|
|
|
|
||
|
||||||
