Sunday 17 February 2008

Double standards

A car bomb assassination in Damascus, which various news sources, including the Sunday Times, are attributing to Israeli intelligence. None seem to condemn the action, due to the victim being a prominent member of Hizbullah, who 'had it coming'. I wonder if they would be similarly non-judgemental if Israeli death squads were detonating car bombs in London – or would our media merely refuse to discuss it?

Kosovo has declared its independence from Serbia, and the West looks on, smiling benignly, Kosovo's Albanian warlords being the good guys, apparently, and ethnic cleansing doesn't count when it's Serbs, Jews and Roma (the minorities in Kosovo) who have to flee for their lives.

From my reading of history, there are very few good guys. One nation's airbrushed hero is another nation's bloodstained butcher. War is a dirty business. There's nothing too profound in any of that, and sometimes one must choose sides, but an evil, even when judged necessary, does not cease to be evil, simply because the perpetrator is wearing the officially-endorsed white hat.

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