Re: Occupied Palestine…
Oh my.
Quell an insurgency?
Several thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed, forcing residents to live in appalling camps. In at least 40 cases, Iraqi forces under Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, used chemical weapons to kill and chase Kurds from their villages. Then, during the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988, Iraqi troops swept through the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan rounding up everyone who remained in government-declared “prohibited zones.” Some 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed. Only seven are known to have escaped.
The full scope of the Anfal horror became known only after Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War. The Iraqi military’s withdrawal from the region in October 1991 after the imposition of a no-fly zone made it feasible for the first time in years for outsiders to reach the area.
Human Rights Watch investigators took advantage of this opening to enter northern Iraq and document Saddam’s crimes. Some 350 witnesses and survivors were interviewed. Mass graves were exhumed. And Kurdish rebels were convinced to hand over some 18 tons of documents that they had seized during the brief post-war uprising from Iraqi police stations. These documents were airlifted to Washington, where Human Rights Watch researchers poured through this treasure trove of information about the inner workings of a ruthless regime.
With this extraordinarily detailed evidence of genocide, Human Rights Watch launched a campaign to bring Saddam to justice.
This is the leader of a country where a minority ruthlessly and brutally put down any notion of participation by the majority for thirty years. He started two wars, killing hundres of thousands. The Marsh Arabs were killed by Saddam dropping high voltage powerlines into the marshes to kill not only the fighters, but entire villages on the marshes. Shia protests were broken up with helicopter gunships. And herein lies the problem.
Most Muslims live with this extraordinary double standard. You casually dismiss genocide committed by a Muslim leader as the “proper thing to do”, yet you microexamine every political decision of western and Israeli leaders. No where is this worse than Palestine. The Palestinian people have methodically been raped by their leaders, yet somehow it is “unIslamic” to squeek even a little complaint out of a trendy Muslim. Arafat stole what may be Billions in aid money over the course of years. Once elected he engineered an uprising so that re-elections were impossible. The quality of life left in the wake of these thieves disguised as jihadis, is one where there are tsunamis of sewage drowing refugees. Yet the Islamic world never holds their leaders to account. Islamic leaders once in power, generally stay in power one way or another for life. Corruption is tolerated, brutality is excused, and never do the “educated Muslims” figure out they have been duped. Trendy hip Muslims will memorize every talking point against Israel. They will banter about an “occupation”, a “seige”, and work on trite analogies comparing Jews with the Nazis who killed 6 million of them.
The thing that Muslim leaders fear the worst is an effective solution to the Palestinian question. Why? Because then about half a billion smart Muslim youth would look around and say, “now what”? At that point the puppet show would end and you would start asking tough , perhaps unanswerable questions of the puppet masters. So long as you are distracted by Israel, the despots ruining the lives of your people can continue to milk the wealth of your countries and keep your people from success.
Israel is a speck, a microscopic fleck in the Muslim world. Yet you pound your chest about the “rights” of the Palestinians while telling me that genocide by a Muslim leader is pretty much OK.
Un-frikkin’-believable.