Not only masked men with black flags behead. Men in suits seated around roundtables also behead. Youngster fiddling with consoles in air conditioned drone control rooms also behead. And supposedly innocuous sanctions also exterminate. Just ask the young Iraqi children with “pencil limbs and eyes too big for their long thin faces” who stared blankly at John Pilger when he visited Iraq at the height of sanctions in 2000. Yet through all those dark years of barbarism against innocent Iraqis, we remained silent, and scandalously so. Human rights organisations would sporadically highlight the slow motion genocide in Iraq, but for the most part our consciences remained untroubled. As Pilger notes, their panoramic suffering was of minimal media interest. No one deemed it imperative to release press statements or protest that the mass killing was ‘not in our name’. (After all, it was administered by the UN, of which all our countries are members). It was a subject too inconvenient to discuss on our media or around a dinner tables. Yet, come 2014, and we are all champions for the welfare of the Iraqi people – a nation whose entire destinies we willfully allowed to ebb away in front of our eyes for almost 3 decades.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:03:46 +0000
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