Answering the call of conscience

11 Aug, 2014

The savagery with which Israel had treated the Gazans was too horrifying to have gone unnoticed even by the Zionist entity's committed patrons in the West. No surprises then that quite a few conscientious nations in there have spoken against Israeli forces' ruthless killings of innocent people, and in the name of humanity they sought international intervention to stop bloodshed. But the one who really turned the heads and put one of Israel's most avowed supporters, Britain, has been put on the defensive by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi who, as a mark of protest, resigned from David Cameron's cabinet, because of his government's approach to the Gaza killings, defining it as 'morally indefensible'. She has accused the British government of a 'morally reprehensible' attitude towards Gaza and also called for a British ban on supply of arms to Israel. Not that the cabinet ministers in Britain don't resign from their positions. They do, but when faced with charges of bribery, corruption, and such other scandals. She was under no such pressure; in fact until a day before, she chaired her government's high-profile World War One centenary function. Nobody in the Cameron government had thought she would resign protesting Britain's continued silence over Israel's relentless barbaric attacks on Gaza - so there is this shock in the British media, some of it having gone berserk, denigrating Baroness Warsi's courage to act on what she believed. She is a Muslim, and is proud of that. But she happens to see the Gaza tragedy in a broader perspective. To her, as it is to all who have a heart that melts at the sight of children being hunted and butchered, the David Cameron government was evasive and despite having the leverage to hold the Zionist hand was conspicuously indifferent to the plight of the Gaza residents. She couldn't take it anymore, and resigned, warning the prime minister that his policy and approach towards the situation in Gaza "is not in national interest and will have a long-term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically".
That her resignation would make Prime Minister Cameron rethink his government's approach towards the Gaza apocalypse, Warsi must not have ever thought and believed. Not that she was unaware of how unmoved and nonchalant remained the then prime minister Tony Blair when his ministers, Robin Cook and Clare Short resigned protesting his decision to invade Iraq. She responded to the call of her conscience, and as a patriotic British citizen she warned against bartering away a moral position for political expediency. And above all, it is a measure of her courage that in the part of world where questioning Holocaust is a culpable offence she stood up to question credibility of its yesteryear's victims. And in a way she has also messaged to the world at large that given Israel's abiding interest in using brutality as weapon of choice in Palestine, time has come to translate their condemnatory statements into some concrete action. That the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) should feel helpless in this because Israel is militarily undefeatable is unacceptable. The truth is that the OIC is not as toothless as it is being shown; its members have the desired potential to degrade the support this bull in the china shop receives from the West. Maybe, it is the actions and policies of Hamas through which the Arabs and others tend to see the plight of the Gazans. Even if so, there is just no reason for them for being indifferent to the anti-Palestine genocidal moves in the Gaza Strip. Baroness Warsi's resignation is not a shot in the dark, nor a burst of emotions; it is the wake-up nudge to international community.

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