by Editor (Editorials, Crescent International Vol. 47, No. 3, Sha'ban, 1439)
It is never acceptable to kill innocent civilians regardless of the circumstances. It is even worse if the victims are children. Yet this is precisely what is happening to civilians in many parts of the Muslim world where the US and its allies are involved.
Let us begin with Afghanistan where on April 2 Afghan helicopters unleashed deadly missiles on hundreds of young madrasah students who had gathered for a graduation ceremony in Kunduz. The American occupiers had recently supplied the helicopter gunships to their Afghan puppets. Afghan pilots were operating under instructions from their American masters.
Why was the gathering of students, clearly visible from the air, attacked? The Afghan regime alleged that there were members of the Taliban Shura present at the event. The Taliban denied this but even if true, does it justify the slaughter of hundreds of innocent civilians? Some 300 people including 102 children were killed in the attack.
Equally shocking is the fact that few Western media outlets bothered to report the mass slaughter. Only a few gave it perfunctory coverage. Obviously, Afghan children’s lives are not as important as say, Anne Frank — especially if the killers are Zio-Americans or their puppets. Such killings will only add to the Afghans’ resentment of the occupiers and their puppets and lead to the intensification of resistance.
Not far from Afghanistan, in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir, another heart-wrenching ordeal of a young child has revealed the level of depravity of Hindu zealots. An eight-year-old girl, Asifa Bano, was kidnapped, gang-raped for four days and then brutally murdered. The perpetrators were Hindu fanatics. While the crime occurred in January, the police special crime branch finalized its report only last month, largely because the event became public. The details are horrifying. The child suffered torture and rape at the hands of her tormentors for four days before she was strangled to death and had her head crushed. All this was pre-planned.
Far from feeling ashamed over such a horrific crime, Hindu zealots came out in support of the rapists and murderers. Two ministers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were among those who attended rallies for the rapists (they were forced to resign following public protests) but their conduct reveals how far India has sunk into immorality and depravity.
Equally troubling is the conduct of lawyers in Jammu that attempted to prevent the police from filing charges against the accused in a court in Kathau district where the rape and murder of the young girl occurred. Supporters of the accused have threatened the dead girl’s family as well as the lawyer representing them. Lawyer Deepika Rajwat said that she has been threatened with rape and murder.
These are shocking developments indeed and clearly point to the danger religious minorities, especially Muslims, face in India. Life has become more precarious for Muslims since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. He is an unabashed Hindu supremacist whose followers have vowed to turn India into an exclusivist Hindu state. Modi and his followers are admirers of Hitler’s racist ideology yet he is eagerly welcomed in Western capitals.
Then there is the Zionist entity that has launched a killing spree against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza who have been participating in the Right of Return marches. The rallies will climax on May 15 to coincide with the Zionist cancer’s 70th anniversary. Israeli snipers have been given shoot-to-kill orders with no restraints.
So far nearly 40 Palestinians, among them several youth, have been killed and thousands of others have been injured. Doctors without Borders says some of the injuries will leave the victims paralyzed because the Zionists are using high velocity rifles whose bullets destroy body tissue. The Palestinian Authority has called on the United Nations Security Council to establish an independent commission to investigate Zionist crimes. Nothing will come out of this even if the UN were to set up a commission. The UN, controlled and bankrolled by the US and Zionist Israel, is fully backed by Washington. No criticism of Israel is permitted at the UN.
Instead of appealing to the UN, the Palestinians should intensify their resistance against the colonizers/squatters. Advocates of peace and justice should also redouble their efforts to make the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) successful worldwide. The campaign is already beginning to bear fruit.
The three locales mentioned — and there are many more — show US involvement, directly or indirectly. Afghanistan is under US occupation. Ashraf Ghani, the nominal Afghan president, admitted in a CBS interview (December 14, 2017) that if US forces were to withdraw, the Afghan army would collapse in six months. This after the US has spent almost $1 trillion fighting the Taliban and training the Afghan army!
In India, meanwhile, despite the alarming rise in Hindu extremism, Western regimes are eagerly courting it. Human rights and freedom are meaningless slogans that Western officials mouth when they want to target a specific country whose policies they dislike. Their allies can rape, kill, and dislocate, including young children, without incurring any opprobrium.
As for the illegal Zionist entity, it exists only because of the massive financial, military, diplomatic and political support the US provides. Israel can do no wrong even when it deliberately targets children because it is merely “defending” itself.
For Muslims the choice is clear. There is no alternative to resistance against the occupiers and total break from the US. Anything that it touches turns to dust.
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