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Ramadi, Gaza, and Western Hypocrisy EVELYN GORDON (Commentary via FLAME)

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Jan. 13, 2016

On December 29, Iraqi army forces, backed by heavy U.S.-led air support, finally seized ISIS’ military headquarters in Ramadi, marking the end of a three-month campaign to recapture the city, which had been lost to ISIS back in May.

Unfortunately, according to the al Jazeera news agency, “the victory would appear as a loss, as the Iraqi state won back Ramadi, but utterly devastated the city in the process.” As you’ll read in this week’s FLAME Hotline featured article, more than half the city of Ramadi has been destroyed, most of that residential, which could amount to as many as 40,000 destroyed homes in this city that once housed more than 450,000 residents.

So far neither Western news media, nor Western politicians nor the U.N. Human Rights Council have raised an objection to this devastation of civilian habitats, let alone any accusations of war crimes. This, of course, is in stark contrast to reporting on the damage caused in 2014 Gaza war, which was initiated by Hamas terrorists shooting more than 3,000 missiles at Israel within a few months prior to that war’s start.

For example, the UK Independentnewspaper reported that “more than 20,000 homes are estimated to have been rendered uninhabitable by shelling and air strikes that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed targeted only ‘terrorist’ sites used by Hamas for military purposes.” As you’ll see in the article below, that number is a substantial exaggeration—probably by a factor of 100 percent. There’s also no mention in the Independent report that Hamas terrorists were embedded among Gaza City’s residential buildings, just as ISIS fighters were in Ramadi.

More telling was the New York Times, summarizing a U.N. Human Rights Council report on the Gaza war, which notes that in six cases of residential building damage in Gaza City following Israeli aerial bombing, the U.N. panel “found little or no information to explain why residential buildings ‘which are prima facie civilian objects immune from attack, were considered to be legitimate military objectives.'”

Yes, residential buildings are indeed “prima facie civilian objects,” and under normal warfare conditions they might indeed be considered inappropriate military targets.Tell that to the U.S. Air Force, which led the bombings of Ramadi, and to the Iraqi soldiers who no doubt fired thousands of rocket-propelled grenades into Ramadi residential buildings to clean out nests of embedded ISIS militants.

I doubt that these coalition forcescourteously dropped warning notes on Ramadi homes—as Israel did obsessively in Gaza—before they leveled them with heavy armaments

More importantly, I seriously doubt we’ll be reading any New York Times or U.N.outrage about the illegitimacy of American or Iraqi conduct in the Ramadi victory.

For a better understanding of the hypocrisy of Western politicians and media regarding the disparate treatment of Israel during the 2014 Gaza war and the U.S.-led devastation in Ramadi, please take just a few minutes to read commentator Evelyn Gordon’s incisive article below.

This piece will better equip you to expose the double standards we see regarding Israel almost on a daily basis in American and world press, as well as among self-righteous politicians and pundits. Please take a minute to review this brief analysis, then pass it on to your friends and colleagues who may benefit from it.

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