Britannia Radio

Tuesday, 19th May 2009

A lethal double standard

11:02am

Two points arise from the apparent victory by the Sri Lankans against the Tamil Tigers. The first is that this has been achieved by flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that terrorism can never be defeated by military means but only by negotiation, ‘peace processes’ and compromise. The Sri Lankans tried that some years ago, with the result that the Tigers were enormously strengthened and merely ratcheted up their terrorist attacks.

As a result of that experience, the Sri Lankans decided that the only way to defeat the Tigers was to destroy them militarily. Consequently, they have waged a war against them as notable for its ruthlessness as for its strategic and tactical skill. In particular, they ensured that the media was excluded from the theatre of war so that what they were doing was not fully exposed to scrutiny.

The lesson to learn from all this would therefore seem to be that terrorist insurgencies can only be defeated by military means  -- which in turn can only work if such measures are not undermined by the queasy neo-pacifism and defeatism of the west expressed through the surrender monkeys of human rights lawyers, NGOs and the media. In the Times, however, Michael Clarke, Rector of the Royal United Services Institute, warns that it may be premature to arrive at such a conclusion since the refusal of the Sri Lankans to try to win hearts and minds may yet mean that Tamil terrorism returns at a future date. Well, we shall see whether that turns out to be true or not.

But what is undeniable is that that war against the Tamil Tigers has exposed the rank hypocrisy and double standards of a western world that demonises and delegitimises Israel, on the basis of a false accusation that it has disproportionately targeted civilians in a theatre of war, while remaining relatively muted in the face of evidence which has emerged – despite the media restrictions – that the suffering of civilians under Sri Lankan bombardment (whether or not the Sri Lankans tried hard enough to minimise their suffering) has vastly exceeded that of the Palestinians. Hospitals have been repeatedly shelled. Thousands of civilians have been trapped and unknown numbers have died. The BBC says more than 70,000 people have been killed in this conflict, while the United Nations says it thinks 265,000 people have been displaced. As even Jonathan Steele writes in today’s Guardian:

There has to be relief that the worst suffering of the quarter of a million Tamils who were trapped on the island’s northern beaches is over. Cowering under government artillery fire, and shot by Tamil Tiger troops if they tried to flee, they have lived for four months in infinitely worse conditions than the people of Gaza during Israel's invasion in December. Palestinians were at least in their own homes, with supplies of food and water, however inadequate. The shelterless masses huddled along the lagoons and sand banks of Sri Lanka's Mullaitivu coastline had nothing except panic, grief and the sight and sound of the dying. The prolonged hell they have been through far outweighs the sudden horror of the tsunami which swept over this same coast four years ago.

Sure, there are some protests. But  where are the calls by academics or trade unions to boycott Sri Lanka? Where are the denunciations of Sri Lankan ‘atrocities’ by the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England? Where are the passionate and emotive TV documentaries about the plight of the Tamils, the one-sided grillings of the Sri Lankans on the Today programme, the front page splashes and multi-part newspaper features on the Sri Lankans’ supposed breaches of international law, the NGOs’ appeals for humanitarian aid for the beseiged Tamils, the attempts by human rights lawyers to prosecute Sri Lanka’s military for ‘war crimes’? No, all these things are reserved instead for Israel, which has demonstrably gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties as far as humanly possible and yet upon whose imagined crimes against humanity the western intelligentsia – which has barely bestrirred itself over the Tamils -- obsessively dwells.