Their tongues just as their minds are forked like those of a snake. Two parallel situations and two entirely divergent, discrepant, opposite evaluations and reactions.
Ukraine – Russia. Ukrainians started shelling the Russian population in the east region of Ukraine known as the Donbass region. In between 2014 and 2022 as many as 8 000 Russians in the said territory were killed. Russia was very slow to respond. When it eventually did, she met with the West’s condemnation.
Palestine – Israel. Palestinians launched a series of attacks inside Israel killing several hundred Israelis. Israel was quick to respond. It has been killing hundreds of Palestinians for the last couple of days, which entailed absolutely no condemnation from the official West.
Whence the difference? Why this hubris?
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken elaborates on the Israeli victims on one occasion and yet another, National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby chokes on words and almost sheds tears for the CNN viewers to see (watch it all!) while the fate of the thousands of Russians or for that matter hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians does not seem to reduce his out of oh so compassionate eyes to tears. Only 4 months earlier Senator Lindsey Graham while talking to President Zelensky was recorded to express his gladness that “Russians are dying”. Double standards? Forked tongues? It is wrong when Israelis or Ukrainians are killed (though in the case of the latter no tears are shed), but it is all right when Palestinians (or human animals as Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said) or Russians are killed.
Consider what outcry would have been triggered if it was the other way round: a Russian politician expressing gladness because of the loss of life on the Ukrainian side or a Palestinian fighter describing Israelis as human animals! We know what uproar such statements would provoke. Comparisons to Hitler would be drawn and memories of the holocaust revoked. Such statements would be repeated persistently, ad infinitum, ad nauseam on and on in the many mainstream media so as to bring their horrific meaning home to everyone over the age of seven. Such statements would be used to justify and sanctify the war against, respectively, Russia and Palestine. Forked tongues, indeed.
People trained by the media, entertainment and schools will never ever see the parallelism of the adduced situations. The impact of the said conduits of mind-shaping is enormous and maintained every single hour. With people’s addiction to listening to or watching the news and the analyses offered by “specialists” every day, their Pavlovian response (Ukraine – good, Russia bad; Israel – good, Palestine – bad) is guaranteed. The few who might dare to oppose that black-and-white moral division are swiftly dealt with by means of intimidation and name-calling (racist, anti-Semite, Putin’s shill etc).
