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Friday, March 27, 2015

Arab allies reportedly killing civilians in Yemen airstrikes

From AFP:

At least 39 civilians have been killed in more than 24 hours of Saudi-led air strikes against Shiite rebels in Yemen, health ministry officials said on Friday.

Twelve of the victims were killed when a raid against a military base north of Sanaa hit surrounding residential areas, officials from the rebel-controlled ministry told AFP.
We can see two layers of hypocrisy, from two different angles,in these two sentences.

In the first case, the reporting of civilian casualties is not causing any angst on the part of those who are up in arms over Israeli airstrikes against Islamist terrorists in Gaza. There won't be any emergency UN sessions to condemn this. There won't be daily body counts in every single article about this new war.

In the second sentence, we see that AFP says up front that the statistics come from a ministry controlled by the Houthis - but wire services rarely mentioned that the Gaza health ministry was controlled by Hamas when reporting their figures of "civilian" casualties.

I have a feeling we'll be seeing lots more hypocrisy in how the media reports the Arab allies' actions in Yemen in the coming days and weeks.