Guest Blog: Steve Plaut

Steve is an economist at the University of Haifa who sends out his daily thoughts via email.  He really should have a blog.

The jets bombed the bejeebers out of them. The ground forces
invaded.  They at long last suppressed the terrorists, who had conducted a
long campaign of suicide bombing and planting bombs, and put an end to any
notion that the terrorists and their sponsors would be granted their own
state.  Many civilians were killed and wounded, yet not a single protest
was made against the invasion anywhere.

I am of course referring to the conquest by the army of Sri Lanka over the
past few days of the last hold-out city of the Tamil independence rebels.
Kilinochchi was the last town held by the Tamil “Tiger” Rebels, considered
to be a terrorist group by the United States.  With it fell the last Tamil
hope of setting up an independent state or even of getting autonomy inside
Sri Lanka.  The Tamils have their own state inside India but were not
satisfied with that manifestation of “self-determination.”  Kilinochchi,
579 kilometers north of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, was until recent
months the center of political power for the rebels.  Over the years,
65,000 people have been killed in the war with the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Meanwhile not a single Solidarity-with-the-Tamil-Tigers protest has been
organized on a single Western campus or in a single downtown square.
Jewish leftist kapos have not taken to the streets to demand and end to
the war of aggression against the Tamils.  Leftist web sites have not
proclaimed every injury of a Tamil civilian to be a Nazi-like war crime
and an act of genocide.  Eurocrats have not pontificated about how the Sri
Lankan response to the terror was out of proportion.  The International
Solidarity Movement has not sent in protesters from the West to try to
defend the terrorists.  Communists and fellow travelers have not organized
flotillas of boats carrying aid to the terrorists.  Israeli politicians
have not lectured the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka about how the whole problem
is that they are insensitive to the needs of the “Other.”   Ehud Barak did
not demand that the Sri Lanka government enter talks with the Tigers and
provide them with guns and funding.  Israeli professors did not organize
petitions of solidarity with the Tamil suicide bombers.  Haaretz
columnists have not turned out column after column explaining that the
suicide bombings by the Tamils are all because they are under an inhumane
siege and hungry.  Writers David Grossman, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua have
not produced poems and essays demanding that the demands of the Tamil
Tigers be met.  Not a single Sri Lankan professor who had a family member
killed by the Tamil terrorists has come out in endorsement of the demands
of the terrorists.  No movement of self-hating Sinhalese favoring a
Holocaust of Sinhalese has emerged.  Not a single Sinhalese public figure
has proposed that Sri Lanka be dismembered and stripped of its Sinhalese
symbols.  None have proposed a change in the national anthem.  None has
proposed dividing Colombo and handing over half to the Tamils.  Virtually
no one knows that 65,000 civilians have died in the fighting and the media
have no interest in covering the story.

But then again, Sri Lanka is just not as advanced a country as is Israel..