Britannia Radio

Massacre of Muslim Civilians that No One Protested
by Steven Plaut

      I usually do not post follow-ups on previous postings, but this time
is an exception.  A few days back I posted a piece on the two wars against
terrorism and the differences between them . Israel's battle against the
genocidal Islamofascist terrorists of the Hamas, which began on the same
day that the war of Sri Lanka against Tamil Tiger terrorism ended.  Sri
Lanka won that war.  It laughingly dismissed all the nonsensical mantras
about how terrorism cannot be ended with military force and it just went
ahead and ended terrorism using military force.

       Interestingly for me, that piece got a huge amount of attention.  A
bit to my own surprise.  It has by now been reprinted all over the web.
The Jewish Press runs an expanded version this weekend
(http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/37723 ).  I am told the Israeli
embassies are distributing the piece in many countries and I am scheduled
to be interviewed about it on Sunday by the BBC.

      While preparing for that BBC interview, I did a bit more homework and
I would like to draw reader attention to a few new interesting facts.

      The war against terrorism in Sri Lanka is a war against the Tamil
Hindu minority and its terrorist separatist movement by the Sinhalese
Buddhist majority of the country.  So here is my current events quiz of
the day.  Who has killed more Muslims:  Israel in Gaza or the Tamil
terrorists in Sri Lanka?

     Huh?, you say.  That must be a misprint.  Didn't I mean Hindus or
Buddhists in Sri Lanka?

     No, grasshopper, that was no misprint.  Read the question again.  Who
has killed more MUSLIMS?

     The answer is that the Tamil Tiger terrorists have killed far, far
more Muslims than the number of Muslims killed in Gaza during the Israeli
anti-terror battle there, almost all of those Sri Lankan Muslims being
innocent civilians and a few of them being policemen.  In Gaza the vast
majority of people killed by Israel have been armed Hamas terrorists.
True, most of the 58,000 . 70,000 people killed in the Sri Lanka war
against terrorism were NOT Muslim, but quite a few WERE.  How many exactly
- is unknown.  You will not find any estimates by checking the web site of
the Sri Lanka Muslim Council because it is filled with web items
denouncing Israel and calling for its annihilation.

      But how can that be?, you ask.  After all, Sri Lanka is a country of
Hindus and Buddhists.  Well, it turns out that 8% of the people in Sri
Lanka are Muslims, and the Tamil terrorists have gone out of their way to
target Muslim civilians there in a brutal manner.  Muslim political
activists around the world have been strangely silent about all this.
CAIR, the pro-terror Muslim lobby in the US, has not said a word.  Not a
single Western campus demonstration has protested the butchering of
Muslims in Sri Lanka nor called for divestment from that country.  Not a
single Western leftist professor or anarchist protester has denounced Sri
Lanka as a Nazi genocidal regime, nor compared its war against the Tamil
separatists as morally equivalent to the extermination of the Warsaw
Ghetto by the Germans.

       Moreover, a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Muslims living in Tamil
areas has also been carried out over the past 15 years or so.   Not a
single article or web page has referred to it as a "Nakba."   In the
northern province of Sri Lanka alone, which is predominantly Tamil, 75,000
Muslims were expelled, and thousands more were expelled from other Tamil
areas.  The number of Muslims murdered by the Tamils has been at least in
the many hundreds, and probably was in the thousands.  In one incident
alone, the Tamil Tiger terrorists massacred 166 Muslim civilians in a
place called Palliyagodella.  In another, they massacred 113 Sinhalese and
Muslim policemen AFTER they had surrendered to the Tigers.  The Tigers
used suicide bombers and loved to plant bombs in market places and other
public spaces, Palestinian style.

     The BBC has evidently run a total of two short stories over the years
about the massacres of Muslims in Sri Lanka.  Yet it has run countless
stories in which Arabs and others allege that Israel is conducting a
"genocidal massacre" in Gaza and also supposedly did so in Jenin.  The BBC
ran countless such stories after the battle of Jenin in April, 2002, in
which as many as 20 Arab civilians may have died collaterally in the heavy
battle in a built-up urban area, and in which 33 Israeli soldiers were
killed.  The BBC never apologized for describing those events as a
massacre.

      The deputy editor of Maariv, Ben Dror Yemini (see next item below),
this past week addressed the "disproportionate" charges against Israel by
retelling the numbers of civilians killed by NATO forces in Serbia or by
Europeans in Afghanistan.  It is hardly surprising that the numbers in
those two arenas make the total sum of Palestinian civilians killed in the
past hundred years of genocidal aggression against Israel seem miniscule
in comparison.  But the fact that more Muslim civilians died in the
(successful) war against Tamil terrorism than in the battle against the
Hamas is a more dramatic demonstration of media bias.  And the fact that
no major media have made the comparison between the two wars against
terrorism, not even Islamic web sites and news agencies, should teach us a
tremendous lesson.

       I did some internet comparison internet searching this week.  While
doing Google and Yahoo searches I found:

      After two weeks of fighting in Gaza in which no massacres at all took
place, there were six times as many web pages to be found on both search
engines for the pair of search terms "Gaza and Massacre" than there were
for "Sri Lanka and Massacre," this after years of war in Sri Lanka and a
death toll more than 100 times HIGHER than the Gaza death toll.  The
number of web pages with "Gaza and disproportionate" is of course also far
higher than those with search terms "NATO and Serbia and disproportionate"
or "Afghanistan and disproportionate," in spite of the fact that far more
civilians were killed in those places than in Gaza   In Serbia a NATO
missile went off course and hit the capital city of Bulgaria by mistake.
So much for surgical strikes and the criticism of Europeans when an
occasional Israel shell goes off course.

      The number of internet hits for the term "Israel Lobby," which barely
exists at all,  is far greater than the number of the "Farm Lobby," which
ruthlessly dictates and controls farm policy all over the world.
References to ethnic cleansing in Gaza are at least 6 times more common
than to those for massacres in Sri Lanka, and of course the only ethnic
cleansing that ever really took place in Gaza was the expulsion of its
Jewish population by the Kadima government of Arik Sharon and Ehud Olmert.