{"id":84513,"date":"2016-12-26T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-12-26T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=84513"},"modified":"2016-12-22T14:19:43","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T14:19:43","slug":"amnesia-at-the-un-the-massacres-samantha-power-conveniently-forgot-to-mention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/12\/amnesia-at-the-un-the-massacres-samantha-power-conveniently-forgot-to-mention\/","title":{"rendered":"Amnesia at the UN: The Massacres Samantha Power Conveniently Forgot to Mention"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It was bizarre to watch Samantha Power at the UN conveniently forget to mention all the massacres done in America’s name. When she talked about \u2018barbarism against civilians\u2019\u00a0in Aleppo, I remembered climbing over the dead Palestinian civilians massacred at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, slaughtered by Israel\u2019s Lebanese militia friends while the Israeli army \u2013 Washington\u2019s most powerful ally in the Middle East \u2013 watched.<\/em><\/p>\n

15 Dec 2016 – <\/em>So there was Samantha Power doing her \u201cshame\u201d bit in the UN. \u201cIs there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit?\u201d, America\u2019s ambassador to the UN asked the Russians and Syrians and Iranians. She spoke of Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica \u201cand, now, Aleppo\u201d.<\/p>\n

Odd, that. For when Samantha talked about \u201cbarbarism against civilians\u201d in Aleppo, I remembered climbing over the dead Palestinian civilians massacred at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, slaughtered by Israel\u2019s Lebanese militia friends while the Israeli army \u2013 Washington\u2019s most powerful ally in the Middle East \u2013 watched. But Samantha didn\u2019t mention them. Not enough dead Palestinians, perhaps? Only 1,700 killed, including women and children. Halabja was up to 5,000 dead. But Sabra and Chatila certainly \u201ccreeped me out\u201d at the time.<\/p>\n

And then I recalled the monstrous American invasion of Iraq. Perhaps half a million dead. It\u2019s one of the statistics for Rwanda\u2019s dead. Certainly far more than Srebrenica\u2019s 9,000 dead. And I can tell you that Iraq\u2019s half million dead \u201ccreeped me out\u201d rather a lot, not to mention the torture and murders in the CIA\u2019s interrogation centres in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq. It also \u201ccreeped me out\u201d to learn that the US president used to send innocent prisoners off to be interrogated in\u2026 Assad\u2019s Syria! Yes, they were sent by Washington to be questioned in what Samantha now calls Syria\u2019s \u201cGulags\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Sabra and Shatila Massacre September 15, 1982. (image by Wikipedia) License DMCA<\/p><\/div>\n

Funny old world. Samantha, God bless her, didn\u2019t mention Gaza, where quite a lot of Palestinian children have been killed by the Israelis. Nor Yemen, where America\u2019s head-chopping allies are now dissing the Shiites and have killed almost 4,000 civilians. Nor the mass killings by Isis in Mosul. Nor \u2013 most oddly of all \u2013 did Samantha mention 9\/11. Here, surely, was an international crime against humanity worthy of mention in Samantha\u2019s roll call of shame. 3,996 innocent dead. A must-be, you\u2019d think, for throwing at the Syrians and the Russkis and the Iranians.<\/p>\n

But no. For there\u2019s a wee bit of a problem there, isn\u2019t there? Because the 9\/11 bloodbath was carried out by al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda in Syria has changed its name to al-Nusra and then to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and \u2013 well, it\u2019s al-Sham (alias Nusra, alias al-Qaeda) that\u2019s been fighting against the Syrian regime in eastern Aleppo. A bit difficult, you see, for Samantha to express her horror over the most terrifying attack on her country in recent history \u2013 talk about \u201cbarbarism against civilians\u201d \u2013\u00a0 when the very criminal \u201cjihadi\u201d organisation which committed this outrage is, yes, in eastern Aleppo fighting against the Syrian army.<\/p>\n

So Samantha has to throw the dead of 9\/11 into the trash bin in order to tell us how \u201ccreeped out\u201d al-Qaeda\u2019s enemies should be at their behaviour in Aleppo. Out, too, go the Christians murdered or deported by Isis in Mosul, those Yazidis subject to Isis\u2019 \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d \u2013 a subject of which Samantha was quite an expert when it was taking place in Bosnia. In fact, Isis simply gets deleted from Samantha\u2019s narrative. They get, in effect, a clean bill of health.<\/p>\n

And we journos are going along with all this. What was the last time you read of Isis\u2019 catastrophic return to the Syrian city of Palmyra\u00a0last week \u2013 surely a victory for those we are supposed to be defeating in Mosul? And some of the Palmyra attackers actually came from Mosul! How did they do that when Mosul is surrounded by the Iraqi army and their allies and all those American \u201cadvisers\u201d? And for that matter, what was the last time you heard about Mosul, surrounded by a government army trying to smash its way into the city against its \u201cjihadi\u201d defenders \u2013 with even more civilians besieged than in Aleppo?<\/p>\n

So here we go again on the familiar semantic trail down which all critics of Syria\u2019s enemies (and America) must tramp. Yup, Bashar is a dictator, his elections a farce, his militias killers, his army ruthless, his prisons so barbarous that Washington sent its captives there for a bit of brutal interrogation. I have actually seen an account of one such session in which the Syrian interrogators concluded that the guy sent over from the US was completely innocent. But seriously, if we were all so \u201ccreeped out\u201d \u2013 like Samantha \u2013 then we would, would we not, have intervened militarily in Syria (despite the Russians) and come to the rescue of the Syrian opposition?<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another odd element to our western outrage \u2013 and the clue lies in Samantha Power\u2019s choice of atrocities. For the gassing of Halabja\u2019s Kurds was committed by Saddam\u2019s air force, who were Arabs. And the Rwandan genocide was commited by Rwandans. And the Srebrenica massacres were committed by Milosevic\u2019s militias who were Serbs. We may have \u201cstood idly by\u201d, as the saying goes \u2013 it, is after all, what we are doing and going to do over Aleppo \u2013 but neither we nor our allies actually committed these atrocities. Samantha stayed on safe ground, didn\u2019t she?<\/p>\n

And this is what we in Europe are doing. The French president and the British parliament \u2013 where the former Chancellor George Osborne did his \u201cwoe is me\u201d bit \u2013 all lamented that they had done absolutely nothing about the suffering of Aleppo. And didn\u2019t intend to do anything; hence all the empty seats at the Westminster debate.<\/p>\n

And I think I know why \u2013 because this is one of the very few times when our fingers are not bathed in the blood of the Middle East. For once, neither we nor our allies \u2013 except for the lads from al-Nusra who are supported by Qatar and our other Gulf chums but who are the \u201cgood guys\u201d in all this \u2013 are guilty of anything more than indifference. Which was exactly the same problem at Halabja, Rwanda and Srebrenica. We didn\u2019t do it, guv\u2019. It wasn\u2019t us this time.<\/p>\n

So shame upon the Syrians and the Russkis and the Iranians. Creeps you out just a little bit, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk is the multi-award winning Middle East correspondent of <\/em>The Independent, based in Beirut. He has lived in the Arab world for more than 40 years, covering Lebanon, five Israeli invasions, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the 2011 Arab revolutions. Occasionally describing himself as an \u2018Ottoman correspondent\u2019 because of the huge area he covers, Fisk joined <\/em>The Independent in 1989. He has written best-selling books on the Middle East, including <\/em>Pity the Nation and<\/em> The Great War for Civilisation. He was born in Kent in 1946 and gained his BA in English and Classics at Lancaster University. He holds a Ph.D. in politics from Trinity College, Dublin. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was bizarre to watch Samantha Power at the UN conveniently forget to mention all the massacres done in America’s name. When she talked about \u2018barbarism against civilians\u2019 in Aleppo, I remembered climbing over the dead Palestinian civilians massacred at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, slaughtered by Israel\u2019s Lebanese militia friends while the Israeli army \u2013 Washington\u2019s most powerful ally in the Middle East \u2013 watched.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}