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Friday: May 26, 2006

A Cretinous ‘Human Rights’ Advocate

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:00 PM GMT-0500

Rantburg links to a newspaper article in the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard about allegations that U. S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, went on a rampage and killed two dozen civilians after one of their own was killed by a bomb. Horrible, if true, and I certainly hope that anyone found guilty of such a crime does not get off as lightly as Lt. Calley. The last paragraph struck me as odd:

“If the accounts as they have been alleged are true, the Haditha incident is likely the most serious war crime reported in Iraq since the beginning of the war,” said John Sifton, of Human Rights Watch. “Here we have two dozen civilians being killed – apparently intentionally. This isn’t a gray area. This is a massacre.”

What’s cretinous about Sifton’s statement? It’s missing three words. If true, this would indeed be “the most serious war crime” by our side “reported in Iraq since the beginning of the war”, but it wouldn’t even be in the top 20 war crimes committed in Iraq in that time period. The ‘insurgents’ routinely kill civilians in larger numbers, and in cold blood. Of course, that does not in any way justify massacres by our side, but it’s amazing that anyone could write such an obviously false statement. Apparently, to some people, massacres by Islamist fanatics, leftover Ba’athists, and their foreign allies don’t really count as massacres.

2 Comments »

  1. That’s probably because to many members of the HOWC (Haters of Western Civilization) the people of Middle East aren’t fully human — either they are a kind of sub-adult near child who must be coddled, protected, and indulged, and his threats laughed off the way one would laugh off a five-year-old child screaming “I’ll kill you!”; or else they are put into the gods-like pantheon of Our Betters, archetypal Non-Western Lessons in Human Form who can do no wrong — but either way, not entirely human and therefore not capable of true responsibility for their actions. Rather leaves the conventional bigotry of race-and-culture prejudice in the dust.

    Comment by Andrea Harris — Monday: May 29, 2006 @ 5:58 PM GMT-0500

  2. Amen, Andrea.

    There’s a line I recall from a movie, the title of which I can’t remember.
    It was set in some white-dominated southern African country circa 1975.
    There’s a scene in which two white plain-clothes policemen are standing on a hill,
    overlooking a traditional African village, and one policemen says to the other something
    disparaging like “Ha. Look at them, only twenty years out of the trees”.

    I think the same attitude is taken by our “moral betters” at HRW and elsewhere–
    the Iraqis are just “twenty years out of the desert, and we really can’t expect very
    much out of them. They’re just wogs, y’know?”

    Such Olympian detachment. Of course, they DO think they’re better than mere Joe Averages
    like us.

    Oh, Doctor, either my browser is screwing up, or something in your site’s coding is
    forcing the comments box out underneath your blogroll, leaving me unable to see what
    I’m typing. Either way, that’s why I’ve ended every line with a carriage-return.
    (Random thought– how many people under the age of 25 know what the term “carriage-return”
    means? “Typewriters? Uh, sensei, what are typewriters?” No doubt some of them wonder
    what computers have to do with a rental agency dealing in horse-drawn vehicles. :) )

    Comment by Hale Adams — Wednesday: May 31, 2006 @ 7:58 PM GMT-0500

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