From: Irish Political Review, August 2002
What
Massacre?
The
IRA, on the anniversary of the Bloody Friday massacre, issued an apology to
the relatives of all the innocent victims of its acts of war. But was the Bloody
Friday massacre really a massacre at all? As we go to print it is announced
that a United Nations inquiry into the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp
has rejected a Palestinian claim that a massacre was committed. According to
the first report by BBC radio, the massacre claim was rejected because the Israelis
only killed 52 people in Jenin in that Action. According to that standard, the
Bloody Friday event thirty years ago falls very far short of being a massacre.
So
does the Racak massacre, which was presented as the reason for the NATO attack
on Yugoslavia and which a Court of sorts is now trying to pin on Milosovic.
As far as we recall only 40 corpses were found at Racak.
It
might once have been argued that the non-combatants killed on Bloody Friday
were not really collateral damage at all, but were the direct targets of the
bombs. But that can be argued no longer. When NATO fired missiles at a television
station in Belgrade, it held that, since the intention was to put the television
facilities out of action, the people who were killed in the station were collateral
damage. When Israel fired a missile into a Gaza apartment block to kill a Hamas
military leader, it held that the dozen non-combatants killed at the same time
were collateral damage. And, when it fired a tank shell into a crowd, it held
that the victims were collateral damage because the intention was to disperse
the crowd.
Surely it is time, in this globalised era, to apply globalist standards to affairs closer to home?
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