Today is a quarter-century since Saddam Hussein’s massacre of the Kurds with poison gas. According to Wikipedia:
The attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people, and injured around 7,000 to 10,000 more, most of them civilians.
I look forward to an outpouring of sympathy for the Kurdish people, for this atrocity, which was committed by one Muslim people against another.
I look forward to the articles by Stop The War Coalition, Respect and their fellow-travellers, the remembrance of the indiscriminate murder of ordinary Muslims, whose suffering they repeatedly claim to identify with and support.
Or not.
It is strange, is it not, that people so vocal about who is right in Palestine, and who was right in Iraq, can be so quiet about massacres in Syria and Kurdistan?
Could it possibly just be that they only care about war and genocide against Muslims when the West is involved?
I mean, after all, if not, who is there to hate?
You didn't have to wait 25 years, Rob. Left Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Benn, Alice Mahon, Harry Barnes and (yes he was one then) George Galloway were all in the small band that were calling for an arms embargo against Saddam Hussein in 1987/8 in order to prevent these attacks. Unfortunately, at that stage,Hussein was a British and US ally in an even bigger and more murderous muslim v muslim war – that between Iran and Iraq. Unfortunately, it was the Labour Right that were silent at the time in the face of the Kurdish genocide.
Jon Lansman, Left Futures
Ah, Jon…the sad thing is that you don't see the irony that so many of those people who were rightly resisting Saddam's advances at the time have fallen so far in their political convictions, that they nowadays apologise for similar totalitarian regimes (or work for their propaganda mouthpieces, like Galloway and Corbyn).
What you have done here is highlight brilliantly how these were once decent people, standing up for the good guys. What happened?
Why are they silent now, if they cared so much then? Because they have changed beyond all recognition.
By the way, if your intention is to link me with the "Labour Right" of the time, I might add that I was all of twenty-one years old and not exactly politically active. I joined the party five years later, in 1993.