The flotilla hypocrisy
Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, goes after Lebanon for flotilla hypocrisy in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. Today, there are more than 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who are deprived of their most basic rights. The Lebanese government has a list of tens of professions that a Palestinian is forbidden from being engaged in, including professions such as medicine, law and engineering. Palestinians are forbidden from owning property and need a special permit to leave their towns. Unlike all other foreign nationals in Lebanon, they are denied access to the health-care system. According to Amnesty international, the Palestinians in Lebanon suffer from "discrimination and marginalization" and are treated like "second class citizens" and "denied their full range of human rights."
Amnesty also states that most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have little choice but to live in overcrowded and deteriorating camps and informal gatherings that lack basic infrastructure.
In view of the worsening plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon, it is the height of irony that a Lebanese flotilla is organizing to leave the port of Tripoli in the next few days to bring aid to Palestinians in Gaza. According to one of the organizers, the participants are "united by a feeling of stark injustice."
This attitude exposes the dishonesty of the whole flotilla exercise. Whether it is from Turkey, Ireland or Cyprus, those that participate in these flotillas reek of hypocrisy. There are currently 100 armed conflicts and dozens of territorial disputes around the world. There have been millions of people killed and hundreds of millions live in abject poverty without access to basic staples. And yet hundreds of high-minded "humanitarian activists" are spending millions of dollars to reach Gaza and hand money to Hamas that will never reach the innocent civilians of Gaza.
This is the same Gaza that just opened a sparkling new shopping mall that would not look out of place in any capital in Europe. Gaza, where a new Olympic-sized swimming pool was recently inaugurated and five-star hotels and restaurants offer luxurious fare.
Markets brimming with all manner of foods dot the landscape of Gaza, where Lauren Booth, journalist and "human rights activist," was pictured buying chocolate and luxurious items from a well-stocked supermarket before stating with a straight face that the "situation in Gaza is a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur."For those who don't recognize them, the pictures are all from Gaza; the last picture is a 2008 photo of Lauren Booth (Tony Blair's sister-in-law) in a Gaza supermarket.
The truth is that there are only two places in the Middle East where 'Palestinians' are better off than they are in Gaza. One is Judea and Samaria, which has one of the fastest growing economies in the World. The place in the Middle East where 'Palestinians' are treated best? You guessed it: Israel. Their treatment in Arab countries is far worse - even than Gaza.
Read the whole thing.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:16 AM
1 Comments:
The so-called human rights activists have no interest in improving the status of Palestinians in the Arab World. Its a pure anti-Israel exercise. What is the old saying? Charity begins at home. But that's where the Arabs fall short even as they relentlessly blame Israel for all of the Middle East's problems.
What could go wrong indeed
Post a Comment
<< Home