Friday, December 19, 2014

UK: Robert Fisk wonders why Gaza war wasn't called "massacre of the innocents"


David Gosling, who was the principal of Edwardes College for four years until his return to Britain in 2010, believes that while individuals in the Pakistani army may wish for revenge after the Peshawar schoolchildren atrocity, the military may well now “soft-peddle their activities in Waziristan”. The Taliban, he says, “has always reacted to the army’s campaigns in Swat and Waziristan with bombs. 
(...) 
It may well be that the Taliban, knowing the dates of the American withdrawal in Afghanistan, now wishes to extend its power in Pakistan. More seriously, the greater the extension of Islamist rule in the Muslim Middle East – in Algeria and Libya, as well as in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, even in Lebanon – the more encouraged the Taliban becomes. As Sunni Muslims, they have often inflicted enormous carnage on their fellow Shia citizens in Pakistan – although without the headlines devoted to yesterday’s massacre. 
“You must remember,” Gosling says, “how enraged people were with the Israeli attacks on Gaza this year. People in Pakistan were furious at the casualty toll – more than 2,000 people, many of them children.” 
Needless to say, the phrase “massacre of the innocents” was not used about those children.


No.  Not one journalist or politician referred to Israel's retaliatory attacks as a 'massacre'.  Certainly not one of innocents.

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