You Can't Have It Both Ways, Mr.George!

Photo: "Myanmar Protester."

Friends, headlines on the television and the internet today shrieked "Bush leads condemnation of Myanmar Brutality." On the surface most people would agree that his action was good and right and proper and say, "Well done, George!"But hang on a minute! George has beenenthusiastically supporting Israel's brutality against the Palestinians since he was elected (and previous Presidents have been supporting the same brutality for forty years). As well, George's soldiers, who invaded and occupied Iraq on a false pretext, have been killing Iraqis for a number of years now (some say more than a million Iraqis have been killed). Now call me old-fashioned but I would've thought that brutality was brutality no matter who perpetrated it and that the killing of people is to be condemned no matter who does it.

Surely, the firing of live weapons at unarmed civilians and Buddhist monks by the military junta in Burma (Myanmar) which resulted in an unknown number of deaths plus the beating up of civilians and monks with batons is no worse than the firing of missiles into the Palestinian Territories by the IDF or Israeli snipers targeting Palestinian children or the collective starving of the Palestinians or the complete restriction of their movements or the demolition of their homes and the taking of their land and the keeping of their taxes...

And surely the action of the Junta is Burma is no worse than America using depleted uranium explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as cluster bombs and torture and missiles and home invasions and phosphorous bombs plus their mass killing and wounding of innocent civilians including men, women and kids (euphemistically known as collateral damage)...I may be wrong but it seems to me that there is a profoundly hypocritical double-standard here.

Brutality is brutality! Killing is killing!
Isn't it?