Saturday, March 31, 2018

Western Rhetoric and discourse on Palestine: Human Rights Watch and others

Yesterday news as quite 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 the Syrian civilian victims.  All those who called for NATO attacks on Libya and Syria (and other places) in the name of humanitarian concern went silent yesterday.  Their ostensible humanitarianism stops at the border of Palestine, thereby exposing the hollow arguments.  Worse, look at the statement issued by Human Rights Watch yesterday.  This organization has been rightly exposed in the Arab world as a mere arm of Israeli propaganda and the propaganda of Western wars in our region.  Notice that the statement referred to Israeli massacre as "policing demonstration" and it seemed to disagree with Israel only on the number of Palestinians killed, not on the killing itself.  The statement even referred to unfounded claims by Israeli occupation to use of violence by unarmed Palestinians and even provided justifications to Israeli occupation army to use gunfire on demonstrators under certain conditions.   Kenneth Roth (HRW director) usually tweets around the clock and yesterday had one or two tweets in which he used the most polite and mild language possible.  When foes of the US uses gunfire (whether against civilians or armed groups) he automatically refers to that as "slaughter".  Notice that he never refers to Israeli war crimes as slaughter.  The word "war crime" was not used by HRW all day yesterday.  This is the organization which calls cases when a Palestinian steps on the foot of an Israeli soldier a "war crime".  Ken Roth was busy reporting about alleged government crimes in Venezuela.  This is the man who is obsessed (according to previous reports on him on this blog-search it) with what he calls "pro-Israel donors" to his organization, which basically dictates how this organization covers up and beautifies Israeli war crimes.  Human Rights Watch should have been invented by Western war apparatuses long before it was founded. IT has been a great gift to colonial practices and thinking.   If the killing yesterday was by a government not aligned with the US, HRW would have called for Security Council Meeting and ICC action.