The merciless killing of over 30 innocent people in Brussels was the work of ruthless, cruel men. Not cowardly, as some commentators have claimed – you need real courage to strap on a suicide vest and push the button. But despicable none the less. Ordinary people, going about their business, trying to make a living – and suddenly their lives and the lives of their loved ones are shattered forever. These latest attacks link to the killings of people in Paris last November, when 130 people died. The hunt is on to find the person responsible for this latest attack. It’s hard to know what these ISIS terrorists want, beyond vague talk of a caliphate throughout the Middle East.
The justified revulsion of so many of us when reading and seeing scenes from the attacks is natural. But are we consistent in our compassion? Well yes – the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the more recent Paris attacks, now this slaughter in Brussels- there can be few of us that haven’t felt abhorrence at this sort of mayhem.
But consistent? For example, how do you feel about the 1,345 innocent civilians killed in Syria during January of this year? Or the 1,109 killed during February? Chances are most of us weren’t aware that they happened: they certainly didn’t get the kind of air-time that the Brussels or Paris attacks got. But the fact remains that well over seven times the number of innocent Syrians died from Western bombing raids in January alone than died in the Paris and Brussels attacks.
But let’s admit it: now that we do know, does it make much of an impact? Do we close our eyes and imagine the groans and wailing of those injuried, the obscenity of bodies – including those of children – blown to bits by American and British (and, yes, Russian) bombers? Maybe, but it doesn’t have the same impact. They’re not like us so they don’t matter as much.
Television is fond of posting pictures of the Brussels or Paris attacks, and detailing the efforts of the security forces to find the perpetrators. With the deaths in Syria, we know the attackers were American and British and Russian. And of course we know precisely the identity of the two men who are ultimately responsible for this massive upheaval in the Middle East. They’re alive and appear on TV from time to time. Their names are George Bush and Tony Blair, and the blood on their hands makes our our conflict here in the north look like a school-yard punch-up.
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Mr Blair once felt the heavy hand of history on his shoulder. Weapons of war tend to be heavy. We seldom hear from those who clamour for military intervention and bombing campaigns as bodies are buried in mass graves and millions of people are left homeless.
Former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic will face a UN tribunal ruling on war crimes and genocide. Is Bosnia stable after the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, a UN safe haven where Bosnian Serbs killed some 8,000 Muslims? In the attack on Sarajevo, thousands of civilians were killed and thousands were left homeless. The actions of Blair and Bush have not made the world a safer place for anyone and Mr Trump remains preoccupied with building walls.
I think,jude, that if you had been attending a wedding in the Middle East and the Axis forces had obliterated the entire party because their ‘intelligence’ thought a ‘dangerous terrorist’ was in their midst then you mid not have been too upset about the deaths of people who, in all probability, voted these governments into office. Yours is one of the few blogs to even mention that the coin does indeed have another side. Think Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and you can see that it’s ok to vaporize people because you can do it with impunity. But times have changed and for worse this part of Ireland is judged complicit
Just as in N of I, there appears to be a hierarchy of victims, Nationalists in the north, Palestinians, African Americans, black South Africans & many more who fail to make the grade in world wide condemnation. I wonder what the connection is here. My own belief is that the underdog is expendable, I think of the FG elected TD, Regina O’Doherty who summed up this thinking, “they brought it on themselves”. If only we accepted that might is right & kept our heads down. Rosa Parks raised hers.
Well said. In all the tragedies perpertrated by fundamentalists we must hope and pray for the Innocents. Correctly you have named the two main people Blair and Bush. The ongoing holacaust being allowed in Palestine by the World(alleged) democracies is horrifying.
When is the World going to realise that Israel must stop this murderous campaign.
Do not the Jewish people realise that their State is behaving more like the Hitler who caused their forefathers such pain.The State of Israel must be forced by all decent people to stop now.
Can it not be seen that we could drive the Palestinian people to ISIS !!
Jim neeson, I think you’ll find the Palestinians wouldn’t entertain ISIS. In fact ISIS attacked a Palestinian refugee camp last year on the Syrian border. Even more curiously ISIS doesn’t seem to view Israel as the main enemy of Arab world, even though most Arabs would. This massive organisation(no laughing at the back) has attacked all those regions that happen to be opposed to western influence, but doesn’t seemed to muster so much as a fart when it comes to Israel. Go figure. All isn’t what it seems with ISIS.
Wolfe tone makes a fair point, how come ISIS are able to operate from their caliphate or whatever it is? Strange. America and the allies were able to wipe out the NAZIs but seem to be having a hard time with a bunch of psychos? Nothing is ever as it seems, we should know, going by our own conflict.
Could not agree more Jude, and I recall, once, we were the bad folk, a matter reiterated yesterday by our caretaker justice minister, I, to this day, always get a hard time off Brit special branch, unfortunately, I’ve to go back for son’s second graduation this year, but, those of a darker colour shall, now, also get the delay and mistreatment by the ignoramuses who join state forces.
As you say, and as a young Belgian lassie said this morning on world service, the west treats death outside the west as unremarkable, acceptable even, they, French and their Eastern cousins, fail to realise, revenge has a long memory, ask the Brits about that.
pushing the brexit vote up according to polls,maybe drag merkle n corbyn round the morgues show them what their immigrant policy is doing.
The current debacle is definitely going to see a huge spike in the `out` camp, no question about that.
Ankara has suffer three such bombings in the past months the last one being only on the 13th of this month when 37 died.
The last I heard that Ankara is in Europe or is it we simply don’t care?
Slaughter in Ankara doesn`t really cut it in the west, Muslims killing Muslims is fine and dandy, it is only when we in the west suffer that people take note. The hypocrisy and cant of Cameron and Hollande is staggering, they blow the crap out of various middle eastern countries (what is the state of play in Libya at the moment? Does anyone even know or care?) As in every war it is the innocent who suffer the most, the whole thing is a mess, so called multi culturism has failed, Islam is incompatible with western values, the EU is in disarray thanks to Mrs Merkel`s open invitation to Muslims to swarm into Europe, who are these people? The west should stay clear of the middle east, it is a shit hole and if they want to kill each other then that`s their business.
THIS ISN’T ME – it’s Joe McMahon…
Jude,
I agree with your introduction.
I have to say when they played the same pictures out after 4 times I had to turn the TV off (people walking from airport, police woman inside airport with torch etc)
I watched different channels later that day and they were all showing the exact same pictures on a loop. The BBC must have shown the same pictures at least 100 times that day.
It wasn’t just that – it was the moral outrage. How could anyone have done such a thing to innocent people going about their business they asked? Why would they have done this?
We had David Cameron on the TV offering his sympathy and the usual stiff upper lip… The same David Cameron who a matter of months ago did all he could to get Britain involved in bombing Syria – another sovereign country.
We had all the well-paid security analysts on spinning the story indulging in the ‘horror.’
Everyone who allowed themselves was being whipped up into a frenzy about the monsters who did this.
The answer to why Paris and Belgium happened is really simple. It’s because of what the West is doing in the Middle East.
All you need to do is look at the hell which is Libya, Iraq and Syria today and the number of people being murdered there every day.
The problem is the media never show us the bloodied bodies there. They never tell us the human stories of the children, babies, girls, boys, mothers and fathers who are being slaughtered every day.
It really is hell on earth and what happened in Brussels doesn’t even come close.
They never tell us the true story of what is happening to the Palestinians – especially in August 2014 when more than 2000 were murdered in a month by the West’s friends Israel.
There were no tears, no sympathy or no public vigils for our fellow human beings in Palestine then.
And all the people who are complaining about Brussels now had absolutely nothing to say about what the Israelis were and are doing to the Palestinians.
That is rank hypocrisy.
If I go down my street and punch my neighbour, and then repeat that day after day, week after week, I can be pretty sure that one day he is going to strike back.
Violence breeds violence.
Joe McMahon
AND THIS ISN’T ME EITHER – IT’S DONAL K….
I see from today’s IRISH TIMES that on 24 March 1916 John Redmond introduced a delegation to LLoyd George and, as a result, war contracts worth £126,000 went to Ireland. (A fraction of what Joe Duffy gets from RTE today).
Also that the delegation asked LLoyd George to fully equip the National Shell Factory in Dublin’s Parkgate Street, so that it could employ 1,400 people “making munitions full-time.”
“The death of 1 person is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic” – Joseph Stalin, Dictator of the Soviet Union.
Stalin or “Soso”, as his nearest and dearest called him, was correct when he said that statement. Stalin himself was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. He was such a ruthless man he even had his closest friends shot.
The killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi’s, Syrians, Libyans, Palestinians, etc is just a statistic to the people in the West. Lets face it, its the truth. The media, as always, tells the majority of people what and how to think. So when atrocities like what happened in Belgium or Paris occur we get just a little taste of the horror that many people in the middle east experience daily but on a much greater scale. All this is the fault of the foreign policy of the United States, the UK and other countries. Its wrong to blame the average Yank, Brit or Croissant muncher on the wrongs of their Governments because the reality is they have as much power over their Government as the average Chinese person has over the Communist Party of China. Yes, we hear all the stuff about living in a Democracy and all that but the reality is we’re told lies over and over again and we’re brainwashed into voting for the same parties over and over again. Fianna Fail’s and Fine Gael’s election results last month is an example of this occurring in Ireland.
So what’s to be done? The reality is the West has no more right to be in the middle east than the middle east has to be in the West. People in the West think that people in the middle east want democracy, they want what we would call “freedom”. The simple reality is that most people in the middle east don’t want nor care about democracy. Democracy is talked about as if its the dogs balls, that its perfect, that its fantastic. The fact is its not. We saw how Democracy was the wrong system here in the North of Ireland, which we now call “Majority Rule”. But that’s Democracy. Democracy works in the West, with the exception of Norn Iron, because of our values. The simple reality is the people of the middle east don’t have our values, so therefore democracy and other things WE hold dear isn’t necessarily what is held dear by many in the middle east and vice versa.
My point is Bush and Blair and their supporters went into the Middle East thinking that the Middle Eastern people would be kissing their feet and thanking them for removing Saddam Hussein and trying to enforce on the Iraqi people Western values. But the reality was very different. Yes Saddam was a tyrant but he was far better than many of the lunatics running about Iraq today. Even today the West considers getting rid of Assad as more of a priority than combating ISIS but the reality is if or when Assad is removed that vacuum he leaves will be quickly filled by ISIS, which everyone knows is getting aided by Turkey. Turkish weapons were used against Russian helicopters, one was shot down. Indeed Putin said Turkey is helping ISIS. (This is the same Turkey that is getting fast tracked EU membership, who denies freedom of the press, etc. Prepare for an EU meltdown if they get in, and I don’t say that lightly)
The Middle East is best left to look after and sort out their own affairs. The Iraqi Invasion should never have happened. Assad should be getting help destroying ISIS, which Russia is doing. The Middle Eastern people do not see invaders of any kind as liberators, they see them as Conquerors or Crusaders. They have a very different society to ours and people in the West, regardless of their apparent good intentions, must realize this. They must realize the average Middle Eastern teenage Muslim girl doesn’t go out on a Friday night with friends and drink alcohol. The average Middle Eastern girl would go to mosque on a Friday. The average middle eastern wife doesn’t care about women’s rights, she cares about her husband, her children and her faith before herself.
Its the same in other nations in the Far East. In Japan there’s an old saying: “In Japan Men come first and women come second”. In China its normal custom for the wife of a man to look after the parents of her husband, hence why most Chinese couples desire to have male children rather than a female because when they grow old they will be looked after. There has been many cases of Chinese people even murdering their female children because under the infamous one child policy in China they couldn’t have more children so they murdered the female child they already had in order to be allowed to have another. Of course there has even been mass kidnappings of male babies in China and Chinese couples even buying/selling male children.
See? The values of people in different countries are not the same as ours and a lot of people in the West seem unable to grasp and accept this reality. The West should get out of every country that doesn’t want it there and learn to mind its own business and look after our own affairs and problems. The USA also has to stop thinking its the World’s Policeman. The UK plays the part of the police dog which it does pretty well, in my opinion….
One response down here in the Free Southern Stateen, Esteemed Blogmeister, stood head and shoulder to shoulder above all others.
Like it or not, it came from the haiku-sized hot-shot Hayes, Brian.
The same Bush and Blair feller who built his stellar political career on taking pot-shots and what not at the PIRA.
After the recent debacle of General Election 2016, however, in which the media-savvy Director of Elections for the dirt-despising, navvy-loathing, blue-of-shirt Fine Gael spun his party into a terminal tail-spin, the suddenly inept MEP wept, and promptly. went. to. ground. By taking. to. the. clouds. Far away. from. the. madding. crowds.
The Altar Boy had altered. The Boy Hayes overnight dropped out of sight and became camera-shy. Brian was suddenly resigned to disliking mikes.
One moment, he was up and ubiquitous and all over the FSS media shop: Director of Elections Brian Hayes says this.
Un moment plus tard, Brian Hayes MEP, dans Le Parlement Europeen, says that.
The bromides of Brian roamed wide and were heard on every side. Whether addressing Reporters in Dublin or being addressed as a Rapporteur in Le Berlaymont, when not warning the House of Laird-arses on the dangerous farce of Brexit (son of Ulstexit), nobody appeared more comfortable in his Shinner-despising skin than Mr Everywhere.
(Excepting, possibly, if the truthie were told, toothie Ruthie).
Truly/ go fireannach, and despite his size-five shoes, did the non-Leprechaun-speaking leprechaun, bestride the Continent like a wise Colossus, possums.
But then, In a blink, and before one could even begin to sorta think, the temperature in a jiffy Tumbled Down on Liffeyside from a high of 84 TD to a low of (gasp) 50 TD. The dejected Director of Elections was outta here and, like a flash, Gordon, on the first plane back to L’Aeroport de Bruxelles.
Brexit suddenly means: Brianeen does a runner beans.
-Zut alors ! Le Frog-speaking Monsieur Le Fog adds la dimension nouvelle to le concept du Hotfoot.
But that was some weeks ago then, and this is, like, now. A terrorist beauty is born. Two mad A-rabs, with one black glove on each left hand, were caught on CCTV pushing their luggage-less trolleys to the Departure Lounge.
The Come-back Kid
No more did he need a push, dunk nor a shove
To be seen to gush on TV , a Peace-drunk dove
Our own MEP Manikin Pis
This chance could not miss
To diss the two I’s, sis and ra, for being hand in glove.