Justice for All, or Peace for None!

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When the murder itself is not the problem and the identity of the victim is irrelevant; when the identity of the murderer is the thing that prompts reaction and dictates its nature and scale, is it really surprising that we live in mayhem, and that hypocrisy is the guiding ethos of our lives? So long as our support for justice remains selective, the very notion of justice loses its meaning. Those who truly believe in justice have to be consistent in their stands. Syrians, Iraqis, Darfuris, Yemenis, Somalis, Pakistanis, etc. deserve justice no less than the Palestinians, irrespective of the identity of the persecutors involved: ruling regimes, extremist militias or foreign occupiers.

Who Are We? We Are Many!

A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD
A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD

Some people have enough moral sense to criticize Israel, but not to criticize anything that Assad and his supporters have done and are still doing. They see ISIS stoning women and chasing away Christians, but they ignore all evidence and testimony of torture, mass rape and mass murder in Assad’s concentration camps. They ignore evidence of collaboration between ISIS and Assad. They ignore Iran’s role in the current mayhem in Syria, Iraq and Gaza, and advocate engagement with her. They defend Russia and ignore her duplicity in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine. Clearly these people cannot truly be concerned with human rights. Their stand by the Palestinians at this stage seems motivated more by ideology than any sense of moral solidarity – an ideology that put Israel and America, and sometimes the West as a whole, at the center of all evil designs in the world; an ideology that, in essence, covets the power that these countries have and longs to appropriate it, rather than be truly dedicated to holding all equally accountable for their misdeeds.

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Down in Ukraine

The debris of a jet engine from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is seen near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk. (IMAGE: REUTERS/MAXIM ZMEYEV)
The debris of a jet engine from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is seen near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk. (IMAGE: REUTERS/MAXIM ZMEYEV)

It was not only an airliner that was shut down in Ukraine, but the last vestige of the post-Cold War global order, and the popular myth regarding the containability of “local” conflicts. In today’s hyper-connected world, conflict anywhere is a conflict everywhere, for spillovers are unavoidable and containability a myth.

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Less Tragedies & Less Hope

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It is not that there are more tragedies happening around us today than there were during the height of the Cold War, in fact, there are arguably less tragedies today than there were then. It’s our awareness of what’s happening around us that has changed. Through social media, satellite technology and around-the-clock news coverage, we have been deprived of the ability to ignore the world and feign ignorance.

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