Posted by Joe on: 01.30.2009 /
There has been a bit of a scrap at the Davos Economic Forum. Basically what happened was that the Turkish Prime Minister took exception to his treatment during a debate with the Israeli President.
Perhaps ironically, the Turks are also fighting ‘terrorists’ in a conflict which has - apparently - killed 37,000. In Turkey it is illegal to mention their own history of violence.
The unfortunate truth is that all the main participants in the wider Middle East conflict have blood on their hands and are responsible for creating the instability. None of them (and by extension, none of ‘us’) have any leg to stand on whilst claiming some moral high ground with regard to the killing of innocents under the banner of tackling terrorism.
In some ways, the fighters of Gaza, Kurdistan, Iraq and Afghanistan could be blamed least. Whilst it is true that these are often insurgents - irregular and guerilla troops - with some very unsavoury methods, they are at least fighting for a noble aim. They are fighting against the odds for freedom, for national recognition, for the end to occupation, for a perceived religious greater good which in other places and in other times would have been lauded. Whereas those whose with fat behinds who wring their hands over the Gazan devastation in plush suites in Davos, Cairo, New York and elsewhere are using it as just another opportunity to gain political capital. Meanwhile millions endure another day in the open prison called Gaza and the overcrowded forgotten 60-year-old refugee camps of Syria and the Lebanon.
The problem is that our priorities are wrong. This is not an issue of identifying which countries are ‘more wrong’ than the others in the Middle East, because that is a game which can never be objectively won. The real issue - which nobody really wants to address - is how to protect and improve the lot of the poorest and most left out in the region. People who have never really had much of a chance in the first place. Sadly as all sides pick up their cudgels to batter ‘the other’ this seems increasingly unlikely.