Irish MP calls out double standards on Ukraine and Palestine
Dublin (QNN)- An Irish member of Parliament criticized on Wednesday the double standards of the West regarding the situations in Palestine and Ukraine, calling for sanctions against the Israeli apartheid regime.
Speaking before the Irish Parliament, lawmaker Richard Boyd Barrett, of the People Before Profit (PBP) party, criticized the international community for failing to condemn Israeli apartheid after 70 years of systematic oppression and aggression against the Palestinian people.
“It took five days for sanctions against Putin and his thugs but imposing sanctions for 70 years of oppression of the Palestinians would not be ‘helpful’,” he said.
Barrett referred to decades of brutal and inhumane persecutions by the Israeli occupation, the successive aggressions on Gaza, the annexation of Palestinian lands and the systematic application of apartheid rules, denouncing that the West does not even want to use the word “apartheid” for these crimes.
In fact, he said that the West sees the Arab population and the Palestinians in particular as “an inferior race,” and does not use the same strong language it uses to condemn Russia’s actions to condemn Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the regime’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.
“Palestinians are treated as an inferior race. Denied access to food and water. And yet no sanctions on Israel for its apartheid regime. Utter hypocrisy,” said Barret as he referred to the international community’s condemnation of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
“And yet you want to be careful about your language… But you will not use the same strength of language when it comes to describing the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians when it is now being documented and detailed by two of the most respected human rights organizations in the world,” Boyd Barret added.
“Anybody who looks honestly at the decades of brutal, inhumane persecutions, successive assaults on Gaza, the annexation of the land and territory, the systematic application of apartheid rules, you don’t want to even use the word apartheid, never mind sanctions.”
"Palestinians are treated as an inferiour race. Denied access to food and water. And yet no sanctions on Israel for its apartheid regime. Utter hypocrisy."
A strongly-worded speech by Irish politician, Richard Barrett.#Palestine #RussiaUkraineWar pic.twitter.com/sVF0PmqNMC
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 5, 2022
Boyd Barrett has long been one of the most articulate speakers in Ireland on the cause of the Palestinian people and he has repeatedly called for the Israeli ambassador to be expelled over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Since the tragedy of war in Ukraine, more than half a million people in the country have fled for safe sanctuary, as countries welcome refugees into safety, and rightly so.
However, the reporting of this tragedy has seen double standards and Eurocentric bias that hold one group of human lives more valuable than others, who are suffering conflicts in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades,” Charlie D’Agata, a CBS correspondent in Kyiv stated live on air. D’Agata did not stop there. He went on to say that, “You know, this is a relatively civilised, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”
The bias and racist elements when describing refugees did not stop at his comments. In fact, reporters from other media outlets said things as equally offensive.
An Al Jazeera anchor airing his views on it said, “These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East” and even an ITV News reporter stating that, “Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, Third World nation, this is Europe”.
