I saw this headline and the first thing that happened, was I got a flashback of Lethal Weapon 2, where Riggs and Murtaugh walk into the South African embassy and Murtaugh asks for information about traveling to South Africa, then starts to shout, “Ban Apartheid Now!”
What I find even more amusing is that Danny Glover is demanding a peacekeeping force to go into Dafur… and yet he protested against the ousting of Hussein in 2002.
So genocide against the African villagers in Sudan isn’t okay, but acts of genocide against the Kurds is?
I find it very exasperating that people seem to find one cause or another that seems to fit with their political agenda, but can’t seem to say that genocide is genocide and there is no justification for genocide. Even more frustrating is the idea that peacekeeping forces can be sent in, but only in specific circumstances. And we all know that “sending in a peacekeeping force” is simply a nice term for military action.
How is it that someone can draw the line between one form of genocide or another? What makes one appropriate and the other not? Could someone explain this to me please? I don’t understand it. To me, neither one is morally correct, and both deserve military action, if necessary, to bring the atrocities to an end.
Maybe someone should point that out to Mr. Glover.
Peacekeeping actually means stand around and watch the locals kill each other. Unless, of course, you are part of a UN peacekeeping force. Then, depending on what country you hail from, you may actually be committing the atrocities. I agree, wholeheartedly, that genocide is genocide. It doesn’t matter who is committing it. It just needs to stop.
I’ve got to support Danny Glover on this one. I disagree with his stance on Iraq, but in all fairness, while Saddam’s regime was pretty brutal, the genocide against the Kurds (and the Marsh Arabs) was pretty much over by the time we chose to invade. Iraq was still a brutal totalitarian dictatorship, and for that reason alone it is good that it ended but active genocide wasn’t going on in Iraq at the time.
My point is that reasonable people can disagree on whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do for a lot of reasons. I firmly believe that it was, but not supporting the invasion of Iraq doesn’t automatically make one unpatriotic or immoral.
The situation in Darfur is clear genocide that is going on right now. So I aplaud Danny Glover for taking such a public stand against it and putting pressure on the Sudan, the United States, and the world to stop this now.
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