Sunday, January 11, 2009

No, I'm not going to 'let this go' and neither should you.

According to a report issued last Thursday by the U.N.'s Humanitarian Affairs Office, more than 1/3 of overall Palestinian deaths are children (34% of the almost 800 total deaths), and a similar percentage of the more than 3,000 wounded are also children (34.8%).

To put that in perspective, note that the Russian invasion of Georgia -- which was vehemently and universally condemned in the U.S. as an excessive and brutal response to Georgia's assault on South Ossetia -- resulted, according to the Georgian government, in total deaths on the Georgia side of 405 (220 of whom were civilians) and total number of civilians wounded between 200-250 (see page 10 of this Amnesty International Report -- .pdf). The Russians agreed to a cease-fire accord after 5 days; the Israelis explicitly reject the U.N.'s call for a cease fire and continue to "escalate" after 14 full days (and counting) of full-scale air and land attacks on Gaza.

Of course, as Greenwall notes, all of that pales in comparision to the duration, destruction and carnage created by the U.S. as a result of the Iraq War (the most unprovoked of all of these conflicts). To say that the U.S. applies a glaring double standard to wars fought by its allies and its "enemies" (to say nothing of itself) is to understate the case.

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