I cannot believe what I read in a Guardian leader last week. Would you have thought you'd ever come across anything like this from the editorial desk of that paper?
None of this is to deny that a case also exists against the British government. To turn a blind eye to, or actively collude with, extraordinary rendition and torture is also to be complicit in a crime against humanity. But there is no symmetry of guilt. The terrorist organizations Britain is fighting against openly and unashamedly plan the murder of civilians. Worldwide they are now responsible for thousands of innocent deaths.
What has symmetry of guilt got to do with it? If Britain has been an accomplice in rendition and torture, isn't this bad enough? Why use the comparison with terrorist crimes as if to lighten the gravity of Britain's misdeeds? After all, you can nearly always point to something worse in order to suggest that the bad isn't as bad as... in fact it is. To repeat: I never thought the Guardian, of all newspapers, would lend itself to thus diminishing the gravity of what the British government would seem to have gone along with.
Except that it isn't what the Guardian has done. I was just kidding back there. The quoted paragraph is not from the Guardian. But this one, on which it is modelled, is from the Guardian:
None of this is to deny that a case also exists against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. Firing unaimable rockets at civilians in southern Israel is also a war crime. But there is no symmetry of guilt. Israel has weapons it can place to within a metre of its intended targets. Its drones have high-quality optics that can see the colour of the target's sweater.
There's a similarly structured paragraph in the post here by Seamus Milne. When it comes to Israel/Palestine the Guardian is indistinguishable in its editorializing from the Milnes of this world, those who will never make diversionary excuses - and rightly not - when a Western and/or democratic government has been up to no good, but save all their apologetics for anti-democratic movements, 'angry' sympathizers with terrorism, tyrannical regimes, and other such contributors to the well-being of humankind.
