Massacre victims should be compensated also [Archives:2004/701/Opinion]

Anyone who has any illusions about the humane characteristics of Zionism must have a poor memory or a closed mind when it comes to the spilling of innocent civilian Arab blood. The victims of the Lockerbie airplane crash are being paid to the tune of US $ 6,000,000 each. No one questions the rights of innocent people to be compensated by the irresponsible actions of other human beings, but it in all fairness the rules should apply to everyone, no matter how nice and polished the perpetrator may be made out to be. The historical fact is that the Arabs living in Palestine or the surrounding areas have witnessed scores of deliberate bloodletting by the Israeli Defense Forces, from the very early days of the Jewish State, when the Zionist gangs of Stern, Irgun and the Haganah were unleashing the terror that was to uproot the Palestinians from their homeland to the well known massacre of the last decade in Qana Lebanon, when Israeli artillery bombarded a refugee camp sponsored by the United Nations set up to “protect” Lebanese civilians from the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. Most western witnesses who saw the carnage right after the attack could not help but bear witness that the signs were very clear of a deliberate shelling on a civilian site that was inescapable to the “elite crack” troops of the Israeli Army. But the massacre that took 106 lives and wounded hundreds more was wholly dismissed by the Israeli Government and the United States as a “mistake”. God only knows how many “mistakes” have literally sent thousands of Arab civilians to their graves under Israeli bombardments, shillings and arranged massacres. Crack and elite troops do not make mistakes, but thanks to the international political cover provided by the United States. Israel can continue to make all the mistakes it wants to and no one will call a spade a spade. In fact, even American forces can also get away with murder, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians as they come to liberate them from the bloodthirsty regimes their government originally sponsored and covered up when he used the most lethal weapons to fight America's war against Iran. The present Minister of Defense, Ronald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq to assure Saddam that the US has no qualms about his use of WMD against anyone he likes, even if he hears lip service disapproval by the US against such use.
The point is that it is really unfair to see thousands of Arab civilians killed by the armies of the sovereign states that claim to bear the standard on human rights, democracy and all that fancy talk, when at the same time the demands will continue for Arabs to compensate the death of any western civilian to the point of making their heirs wealthy. Yet to this day, Israel has not compensated any one for the massacres of Deir Yasin, Qana, Sabra and Shatilla, Jenin and continues to regard them as outstanding military achievements of the crack Israeli Defense Forces or the Mossad.
This double standard of dealing with victims of deliberate massacres raises many questions about how sane is the world we live in today. The powerful and the perpetrators of massacres can get away with all their bloodletting, but the Arabs will never see justice done for them, even if the Israelis rain all their 200 or so atomic weapons on the Arab capitals. Most Arabs have no respect for the killing of civilians and there is nothing in our values that would condone such actions. But the fact that Arab blood is not regarded as pure by Israel and her American friends and the death of Arab civilians has become a leisure hobby of many Israeli commanders has led many Arab youths to feel so much frustration that they become willing ordinance carriers in order to voice their frustration at the double standards applied even for the cost of innocent blood.
Even with the whole world having witnessed the carnages which Israeli forces raved about on so many occasions, Israel continues to enjoy immunity from even being condemned in the international forums that supposedly represent international legitimacy, and the United States will go to great lengths to safeguard massacre engineers like Ariel Sharon from any genuine prosecution efforts. We saw this in Belgium, and we saw this in the United Nations. But if anyone has any doubts about what we are saying all one has to do is read the Israeli press: In an interview with the “kol haer” magazine five Israeli soldiers said that the Artillery commander had said to his soldiers “We are skilled marksmen… Anyhow, there are millions of Arabs… It's their problem. Whether Arabs become one more or less is just the same…we have accomplished our duty.” That is how the crack and the elite think. Need we say more.
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