The latest Guardian editorial (“Sri Lanka: No-inquiry zone“, April 27) is ostensibly about war crimes committed by the Sri Lanka regime against the Tamil Tigers but, in another example of their editors’ inability to hide their single obsession with the Jewish state, also implies that the attacks on the credibility of the UN Human Rights Commission – and the Goldstone Report which the UNHRC commissioned – has had an injurious effect on the way civilians are treated in other countries. Specifically, the editorial notes:
“A UN panel has just produced [a report] about the carnage of civilians which took place two years ago when government forces crushed the Tamil Tigers…but will likely be shelved…as hard-hitting as anything Goldstone produced, and therefore is just as likely to be shelved”
The editorial continues:
“One country’s ability to bury the evidence of war crimes endangers how civilians are treated in all other conflicts.”
The malicious implication is clear: Efforts by Israel and her defenders to refute and undermine the credibility of The Goldstone Report has emboldened other nations who are inclined to commit acts of violence against its civilians. The editorial then notes:
That there is credible evidence that government soldiers targeted civilians, shelled hospitals and attacked aid workers in the final months of the war against the Tamil Tigers is indisputable. That the Tigers used civilians as human shields and shot those attempting to flee the carnage at point-blank range is equally true. Tens of thousands died as a result of these twin brutalities.
Even by Guardian standards this is an especially vicious narrative – as if Sri Lankan troops, and rebel Tamil Tigers, would have behaved more morally if the Goldstone Report hadn’t been refuted. Further, the implication that there is any parallel at all between the conflict in Sri Lanka, which has claimed a total of more than 100,000 lives according to Freedom House, and Israel’s war in Gaza is simply ahistorical.
As with the Guardian’s equally bizarre contention, regarding the uprisings in the Arab world against despotic regimes, last month that, whatever the issues in each particular Arab country, Palestine was the “cockpit of the crisis“, the paper again shows itself singularly obsessed with the actions of the democratic Israeli state and her supporters.
Paraphrasing, and slightly tweaking, an old adage: there are some ideas so crazy, and so implausible, that only Guardian editors could believe them.
