Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Sri Lanka and Gaza

Sunny has a good post over at Pickled Politics explaining why the usual suspects are all of a sudden getting smug about the anti-war left's supposed failure to countenance the violence in Sri Lanka.

Speaking as someone who might be considered to be on the evil anti-war left, who actually has written about both Sri Lanka and Gaza (have a look in the archive if you don't believe me), I think the lack of coverage towards Sri Lanka - other than on the excellent BBC website, which has actually led the entire site with the conflict on many occasions, and perhaps Channel 4, who have led the news with the violence there a couple of times - comes from the usual shoulder-shrug of 'What's it got to do with us?'. Israel is viewed as being crucial to the future of the whole region, whereas Sri Lanka isn't, and while British troops are stationed in the 'Middle East', they aren't in South Asia. It's not a conflict that potentially could boil over into neighbouring countries, horrific though some of the stories are.

I do, however, believe that there are parallels that can be drawn between the recent upsurges of violence in Sri Lanka and Gaza. Both were, I think, brought about by impending elections; both are born of the notion that in some way you can make people think you can eradicate terrorism by annihilating its perpetrators, even if you don't believe it yourself; both have involved the needless slaughter of dozens of human beings for simply being in the wrong place in the wrong time.

That doesn't justify the kind of "Wurrgh, you just hate Jews whereas Muslims are the real evil" bollocks you get on certain websites, though.

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