Western rhetoric & discourse on Palestine: Human Rights Watch & others, angryarab.blogspot.com, 31/3/18:
"Yesterday's news was symptomatic. You can take it as an example of the hypocrisy of Western (government, academic and media) rhetoric on Palestine. Notice the utter silence of all those who have been shedding crocodile tears over Syrian civilian victims. All those who called for NATO attacks on Libya, Syria and other places in the name of humanitarian concern were silent yesterday. Their ostensible humanitarianism stops at the borders of Palestine, thus exposing their hollow arguments. Worse, look at the statement issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday:
'The shocking number of Palestinians killed and hurt today by soldiers firing across the Gaza fence raises serious questions about Israel's longstanding use of live ammunition to police demonstrations. Israeli allegations of violence by some protesters do not change the fact that using lethal force is banned by international law except to meet an imminent threat to life.'
"This organization has been rightly exposed in the Arab world as a mere arm of Israeli and Western propaganda in our region. Notice that the statement refers to the Israeli massacre as 'policing demonstrations', and it seems to disagree with Israel only on the number of Palestinians killed, not on the killing itself. The statement even refers to unfounded claims by the Israeli occupation forces that unarmed Palestinians used violence, thus justifying the Israeli occupation army's use of gunfire on demonstrators under certain conditions. HRW's director, Kenneth Roth, usually tweets around the clock, and yesterday had one or two tweets [about the massacre] in which he used only the mildest language. However, when foes of the US use gunfire, whether against civilians or armed groups, he automatically refers to the result as 'slaughter'. Yet he never refers to Israeli war crimes as 'slaughter'. Nor was the term 'war crime' used by HRW yesterday. This is the organisation which calls cases of Palestinians stepping on the toes of Israeli soldiers 'war crimes'. Roth was busy reporting alleged government crimes in Venezuela. This is a man obsessed (according to previous reports on him on this blog - just search it) with what he calls 'pro-Israel donors' to his organization, who basically dictate how HRW covers for and beautifies Israeli war crimes. HRW should have been invented by Western war apparatuses long before its founding. It has been a great gift to colonial practice and thought. If the killings yesterday had been perpetrated by a government not aligned with the US, HRW would have called for a meeting of the Security Council and action at the ICC."
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