If you replace references to the Tamil Tigers' leadership with Hamas and its leadership, this Washington Post staff-ed would be just as true. It would also be too politically incorrect to be published:
Moreover, there can be little doubt that the calamity that befell the Tigers as well as those trapped with them was caused by the group's own depravity. Mr. Prabhakaran, as much a cult leader as an insurgent commander, did much to establish suicide bombing as a tactic for extremists around the world. He orchestrated the assassination of a Sri Lankan president and an Indian prime minister; he enslaved and systematically brainwashed children. He refused to accept compromise proposals that would have granted the Tamils autonomy, and he triggered the government's final offensive by cutting off the water supply to eastern Sri Lanka. The Tigers were rightly branded a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and India.
Dream on . . .
UPDATE May 19: While we're on the subject of Sri Lanka and double standardd against Israel, Melanie Phillips says:
But what is undeniable is that that war against the Tamil Tigers has exposed the rank hypocrisy and double standards of a western world that demonises and delegitimises Israel, on the basis of a false accusation that it has disproportionately targeted civilians in a theatre of war . . . .
Sure, there are some protests. But where are the calls by academics or trade unions to boycott Sri Lanka? Where are the denunciations of Sri Lankan ‘atrocities’ by the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England? Where are the passionate and emotive TV documentaries about the plight of the Tamils, the one-sided grillings of the Sri Lankans on the Today programme, the front page splashes and multi-part newspaper features on the Sri Lankans’ supposed breaches of international law, the NGOs’ appeals for humanitarian aid for the beseiged Tamils, the attempts by human rights lawyers to prosecute Sri Lanka’s military for ‘war crimes’? No, all these things are reserved instead for Israel, which has demonstrably gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties as far as humanly possible and yet upon whose imagined crimes against humanity the western intelligentsia – which has barely bestrirred itself over the Tamils — obsessively dwells.
