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Turning a Blind Eye to the death of Children

The loss of life in Gaza and the West bank continues - and the world turns a blind eye! One must ask why?

CommonDreams reports on the death of 68 children in the Gaza Strip in the 12 months to June last:

"A prominent Palestinian human rights group says it has found evidence that 68 children were killed in the Gaza Strip in the 12 months to June this year as a result of "disproportionate and excessive lethal force" by the Israeli military.

The deaths are documented, with witness testimony, in a report published today by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Many of the deaths resulted from an Israeli military incursion into Jabaliya, in eastern Gaza, in late February and early March, in which more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of them civilians, died in what Israel said was an operation to stop rockets being fired into southern Israeli towns.

Others were killed in smaller strikes before a ceasefire was reached in June between Gaza's Hamas administration and Israel. Despite occasional breaches, the truce still holds. In the year to June, another 12 children were killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank.

The rights group said many of the deaths passed without investigation, and those internal Israeli military inquiries that were held did not meet international standards of independence and transparency."

Meanwhile, Adri Nieuwhof, a consultant and human rights advocate, on Electronic Intifada
writes in a piece "West's silence towards Israel's racial discrimination unacceptable" :

"The United States, Canada and Israel have withdrawn from the global process to eliminate racial discrimination. They will likely be joined by countries from the European Union if the case of racial discrimination against Palestinians is put clearly on the agenda. Yet, the calls by Nobel Peace Prize winners Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to fight racial discrimination haven't lost their power and are still valid. At a press conference after the UN Human Rights Council meeting in September 2008, Tutu said: "I think the West, quite rightly, is feeling contrite, penitent, for its awful connivance with the Holocaust. The penance is being paid by the Palestinians. I just hope again that ordinary citizens in the West will wake up and say 'we refuse to be part of this.'" The silence and indifference of the world community to Israel's racial discrimination against Palestinians is a blow to all people who cannot accept injustice and unjust behavior, either from individuals or states. Moreover, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said about racial discrimination against African-Americans in the US, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

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