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Guilty Until Proven Guilty

(Foreign Policy) David Brog - On April 28, 2003, a crowd of Iraqi civilians gathered outside U.S. Army headquarters in Fallujah to protest the occupation of their city. As tension grew, U.S. soldiers began firing upon the crowd, killing at least 13 Iraqis and wounding more than 70. U.S. troops insisted that they fired only to defend themselves from gunfire coming from the crowd. The protesters claimed that they were unarmed and never fired at the soldiers. The odds are that you never even heard of this incident, or of the tens if not hundreds of incidents like it, in which civilians have been killed as U.S. soldiers fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. But the odds are overwhelming that you have heard - repeatedly - of an Israeli operation last week aboard a Gaza-bound ship. Israel's naval commandos, several of whom were beaten to within an inch of their lives, responded with lethal force, killing nine people. The term "double standard" does not sufficiently capture this phenomenon. It's not just that the Israelis are being held to a different - and immeasurably higher - standard than the rest of humanity. Israel is now being judged in the absence of any objective standard whatsoever. As Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, it seems that Israel is now "guilty until proven guilty." Many of those who are horrified by Israel's blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza never once questioned the U.S. blockade of Saddam-controlled Iraq throughout most of the 1990s, although America's enemies protested the U.S. blockade in terms almost identical to those now used to protest Israel's blockade of Gaza. Today Israel's soldiers are in the dock. But tomorrow it will be our own. The writer is executive director of Christians United for Israel.
2010-06-11 09:12:08
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