Middle East. Different Standards.

A reader's letter in the The Guardian today:

I think I've got the point (Bush sees Lebanon changes as move to free Middle East, March 9). There are good bombs and bad bombs and good armies of occupation and bad ones. Syria would be an example of a bad army of occupation, but the US and Israel would be good ones. Similarly, Iran's bomb, if it had one, would be bad, but Britain's, France's and Israel's are good. After all, we don't want to be encumbered with anything resembling a principle here.

And an interesting opinion piece in the same paper by Daphna Baram [Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford. She was a fellow of the Reuters Foundation Program in Oxford University, and News Editor of Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir], the author of Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel, wherein she claims that:

"If my prime minister is a war criminal, so is Tony Blair....I agree that my prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is a war criminal. From the intentional killing of 69 civilians in the village of Qibya in 1953, through the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, all the way to the wild bombing of Palestinian cities in the last few years, his career is steeped in vile criminality."