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The fallacy of the colonial 'right to self-defence
Colonial powers have long demanded the 'right to self-defence' against the people they have colonised.
Gathara, Patrick http://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/16/the-fallacy-of-the-colonial-right-to-defence
Publisher: Al Jazeera
Date Written: 16/05/2021
Year Published: 2021
Resource Type: Article
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Colonial occupiers have long claimed a “right” to defend themselves from the resistance of native communities, including by committing mass murder. The history of African colonisation is littered with the corpses and mass graves of those who dared to resist the militarily superior Europeans.
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The idea that imperial land grabbers have the right to terrorise, brutalise, torture and murder those whose land they steal under the rubric of “self-defence” flies in the face of UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 of 1982 which recognised “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”. That resolution specifically reaffirmed this right in the case of the Palestinian struggle.
Thus, today in Gaza, rather than seeking “moral clarity”, the West is using moral obfuscation to justify attacks on a refugee population by a colonial power that has evicted them from their land, blockades them in what is, in essence, an open-air prison, and then claims the right to do so in peace and quiet.
When Western media speaks of a “cycle of escalation”, it equates oppression to the resistance to oppression, presenting the violence as a conflict between two sides with equal claims to security and land. It ignores that the Palestinians are engaged in a struggle for national liberation against a decades-long illegal and immoral occupation, and the imposition of a regime of racial and ethnic discrimination which Human Rights Watch, in a report the media pointedly refuses to bring up, says fits the definition of the international crime of apartheid.
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If Western media, politicians and diplomats truly seek moral clarity, it behoves them to reject outright as gaslighting and bothsidesism, the outrageous proposition that colonial states such as Israel have a right to defend themselves from those they oppress.
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