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US newspaper editorial
This atrocity will not be televised
For a lesson in sheer hypocrisy, it'd be hard to do better than to compare the deafening silence on the slaughter of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat with the hysteria over Israel's counter-terror campaign in the West Bank.
In Gujarat, at least a thousand innocent civilians have been burned or hacked to death by Hindu mobs in ongoing pogroms, while Indian police do little to protect them.
But where's the UN fact-finding mission about to descend on New Delhi?
Where's the Saudi minister desperately concerned about his co-religionists and threatening an oil boycott?
Where are the European politicians' inane references to the Holocaust?
Where, too, are the American groups who fretted about "anti-Islamic" feeling in the United States - and "murderous" U.S. bombing in Afghanistan?
For that matter, where are the hordes of international journalists? Why isn't CNN on hand 24/7 recording every splatter and gasp - and promulgating every bizarre conspiracy theory?
The answer?
None of the above care about the unfortunate Muslims of Gujarat - because these poor folk can't be painted as the victims of Israelis or Americans.
Hindu mobs first went on a rampage in the Gujarati capital of Ahmedabad on Feb. 27, after Muslims set fire to a train carrying Hindu pilgrims and activists, killing 60 people.
Police stood by as Muslim businesses and homes were torched, often with families trapped inside. Several hundred people were murdered in the first few days. Similar rioting has continued in the area ever since.
The official death toll is now 900. Some foreign observers, including Human Rights Watch, claim that the real number is closer to 2,000 and have charged that the violence was orchestrated by the state government.
It is unlikely that Gujarat state officials were directly involved in the killings. But it's clear that the state and federal governments have failed to protect Muslim citizens from sectarian violence.
This is a betrayal of everything India's secular, democratic state is supposed to stand for. But it's not all that surprising: Tragically similar horrors on a huge scale have been all too frequent in India for more than half a century.
What is surprising - and far more disappointing - is the hypocrisy of the world's Muslim and Arab governments and those in the West who have joined them in their unjust demonization of Israel, but who choose to ignore a genuine, ongoing atrocity.
New York Post editorial
May 1, 2002
MG: We do not share the American paper’s view that Israel should be let off or subjected to less scrutiny for its crimes against the Palestinain people - editor.
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