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A Separate Standard for Israel

[Family Security Matters] Mark Silverberg - On any given day, Israeli prisons are hosting Red Cross representatives, journalists, lawyers, prisoners' advocates, as well as family members of convicted Palestinian prisoners, while Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas on Israeli soil, is being held in isolation and denied any and all visitation rights from lawyers, family and even the International Red Cross in violation of his human rights and international law. So, where is the international outcry for Shalit? Israel is constantly confronted with the demand that it must return Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians and the Golan Heights to Syria - areas seized during the 1967 Six-Day War. Why then do we never hear that same argument being raised against other nations? After World War II, Poland annexed 10% of historic Germany (East Prussia); Morocco controls the Western Sahara; Armenia has controlled 15% of neighboring Azerbaijan since 1994; Turkey has controlled half of Cyprus since its 1974 invasion; Russia has controlled the Kurile Islands off northern Japan for 63 years and China has occupied Tibet since 1950. So, where is the international outcry demanding that these countries return lands they seized in war? I don't recall any demands being made of any nation for compensation or allowing a right of return to any refugees displaced after any wars in modern times - except for Israel. Czechoslovakia expelled its Sudetenland Germans from their homes after World War II; the Poles expelled millions of Germans from East Prussia in 1945; thousands of Turkish Cypriots were displaced by Greek military forces in the 1960s while Turkish forces displaced thousands of Greek Cypriots from Northern Cyprus after their 1974-1976 war; 450,000 ethnic Chinese were expelled from Vietnam in 1978-1979; the Bangladeshis expelled over three million Hindus in 1974; 250,000 Georgians were displaced from Abkhazia between 1993 and 1998, not to mention more than 500,000 ethnic Russians in Chechnya who were displaced during the First Chechen War in 1994-1996 and more than 800,000 Kosovar Albanians who were expelled from Kosovo in 1998-1999.
2008-12-26 06:00:00
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