In the great modern humanitarian tradition, “we” never commit violence, but “they” constantly do. So if the US bombs a village in Afghanistan and kills dozens of civilians, it’s clearly an accident. If the Taliban do it, it’s obviously outright terrorism. Such blatant inconsistencies are routinely ignored by most “liberals” and conservatives. Noam Chomsky explains:
Evidently, a crucial case is omitted, which is far more depraved than massacring civilians intentionally.… Namely, knowing that you are massacring them but not doing so intentionally because you don’t regard them as worthy of concern.… That is, you don’t even care enough about them to intend to kill them.… Thus when I walk down the street, if I stop to think about it I know I’ll probably kill lots of ants, but I don’t intend to kill them, because in my mind they do not even rise to the level where it matters.… There are many such examples.… To take one of the very minor ones, when Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Sudan, he and the other perpetrators surely knew that the bombing would kill civilians (tens of thousands, apparently).… … But Clinton and associates did not intend to kill them, because by the standards of Western liberal humanitarian racism, they are no more significant than ants.… Same in the case of tens of millions of others.
I’ve written about this repeatedly, for example, in 9/11.… And I’ve been intrigued to see how reviewers and commentators (Sam Harris, to pick one egregious example) simply cannot even see the comments, let alone comprehend them.… Since it’s all pretty obvious, it reveals, again, the remarkable successes of indoctrination under freedom, and the moral depravity and corruption of the dominant intellectual culture.
It should be unnecessary to comment on how Western humanists would react if Iranian-backed terrorists destroyed half the pharmaceutical supplies in Israel, or the US, or any other place inhabited by human beings.… And it is only fair to add that Sudanese too sometimes do rise to the level of human beings.… For example in Darfur, where their murder can be attributed to Arabs, the official enemy (apart, that is, from “good Arabs,” like the tyrants who rule Saudi Arabia, “moderates” as Rice and others explain).
When it comes to a case like Israel/Palestine, it’s constantly astounding how most Jews are able to defend the massacre of Palestinians in the name of security.