Merkel Believes in Human Rights, but Not for Palestinians By Muhammad Salahuddin

Merkel Believes in Human Rights, but Not for Palestinians

By Muhammad Salahuddin

May 25, 2006

Arab News, 23 May, 2006

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was furious because Atef Adwan, minister of refugees’ affairs in the Hamas-led Palestinian government, treaded recently the Germany territory on a Schengen visa. She has impeccable credentials when it comes to cultural and democratic values that apparently include the principles of human rights.

She flies into a rage whenever she thinks of Nazis and their excesses and her sympathy and concern for the Holocaust victims knows no bounds. Ironically, she has never felt the slightest measure of sympathy for the victims of massacres, house demolitions that take place while the inmates are still inside, destruction of farms and factories — victims of crimes committed by the Zionist powers in Palestinian territories on a daily basis. She behaves as if nobody had told her anything about the penalizing sanctions against the Palestinian people while Israel continues occupying their lands and sending death squads to assassinate their leaders creating a cycle of violence in occupied territories.

The chancellor has, perhaps, not heard about the more than 5 million Palestinian refugees who have been leading a miserable life in packed refugee camps in abject poverty over the past 58 years. She may also be blissfully unaware of the cause of such huge number of people becoming homeless and landless. It was the Jewish settlers and Zionist organizations armed and financed by her country who created such an unprecedented number of refugees in Palestine. This lack of awareness and humane sympathy might have been the reason why the reports of Israel’s cruelties to the hapless Palestinian civilians leave her untouched even as fumes at the Palestinian minister’s entry to German territory though he did it in a perfectly legal manner.

The people, particularly in the Middle East and the Third World are now wondering if the standard bearers of modern Western civilization, particularly the German chancellor and her newly found ally President George Bush, care at all for the principles of justice and human rights or the international law about which they wax eloquent. Can it be that all their human and democratic values are applicable to the entire humanity except the Palestinians because their persecutors are the Zionists?

I don’t think the chancellor would approve of anyone causing her pet dog, or any stray dog for that matter, to be starved or denied required treatment, let alone being tortured to death. Still Ms. Merkel has no qualms about rallying round the US and some other countries when they decide to starve the millions of Palestinian babies, sick people and old men and women possibly until their death.

Why doesn’t the chancellor feel any concern for the thousands of male and female Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails? Don’t they deserve, in her view, the protection and restoration of their basic rights, not even the rights the dogs in her great nation enjoy?

Anyone who adopts a policy of double standard loses his or her credibility.

The German head of state, in this instance, has been obviously applying a double standard in dealing with the two people, Israelis and Palestinians. In their keenness to please the Zionists, the Western leaders have never hesitated to throw to the winds the highest human values such as justice, equality and human rights.

The chancellor may argue that the Jews deserve special treatment because they have been persecuted and oppressed. No one disputes the point. But the people of the Arab world would like to ask the chancellor, as Iranian President Ahmadinejad did, “Should the Palestinians and other Arabs be punished for the crimes committed by the Germans and other Europeans? You please take and settle them in your country, in the vast planes of the United States or any other place in Europe or at the least let them return to the place from where they originally came. It is you and not the Hamas, who should bear the burden of admitting to their oppression and compensating them.”

Muhammad Salahuddin, (msalahuddin@makpublish.com)

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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