UNDER THE SAME SUN, THOSE DEAD KIDS FROM MANCHESTER TO KEBBITHIGOLLEWA

Rajpal Abeynayake

(Rajpal Abeynayake was the former Editor in Chief of the Sunday Observer, the Daily News and the Lakbimanews English weekly.)

This week’s terrorist attacks in Manchester would remind most Sri Lankan’s of attacks in buses and trains and on office blocks in Sri Lanka.
All the circumstances are familiar, such as explosives packed with ball bearings, children dead, people shocked, and numb with disgust and fear.
Except for this one difference.
Nobody outside of Sri Lanka cared one toy pink balloon when Sri Lankan children were murdered.

To this day, even, at the United Nations Human Rights Council, the former Sri Lankan president and his army is being taken to task for ensuring that just these kinds of attacks were stopped. But nobody talks about the children of Kebbithigollewa who were killed by terrorist attacks very similar to, or worse than than the attacks in Manchester a few days back. (They were Claymore mined for god’s sake.)

There are no flowers or teddies for these children, and no sorrowful odes certainly not from BBC CNN or Channel 4 or of course any of the leaders of the ‘free world.’
No children should be killed, not in Manchester, not in Kebbithigollewa, not in any part of the world.

But yet the world reacts differently. Nobody cares about this anomaly anyhow, not the liberal tear jerking fluffy heads of the press here, who cry in their sleep and beat their breasts in their waking hours for ‘Justice’ and good journalism. What a pack of forgettable silly-heads.
When the children of Manchester are killed they say no stone must be left unturned to apprehend these terrorists. Human rights are held in suspension.
The British Premier insists human rights laws should be held in abeyance in order to combat terror.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3820659/At-justice-troops-Ministers-pledge-suspend-human-rights-laws-wartime-stop-soldiers-dragged-courts.html

Britain will cry buckets for children in Manchester, as Britain should, but not one tear would be shed for the scores who were killed in Sri Lanka, in Kebbilithigollewa and elsewhere, and the soldiers who were also killed and maimed in their efforts to rid the scourge that killed these children.
Instead Britain cries for the blood of these Sri Lankan soldiers, or at least the British government does. They want our soldiers to hang for their services.
And yet the British cry for the children of Manchester.
Cry for the children of Kebbithigoloewa, Britain.
Cry for the soldiers who stopped children from dying.
I know many arguments would be made against my point, each getting closer to vilification rather than explanation, as the intensity of the denial about the double standard increases.
None of that would cut.
Because everybody knows. Everybody including every cringeworthy hypocrite knows.
We stopped terrorists who killed small children, and cannot be called out for it, when Britain is using every rule out of the book to unsuccessfully stop terrorists from killing their own little kids.
You may still get away with your charade, but that won’t stop the hypocrisy from reeking upto the Pearly Gates and right unto god’s own quarter, until Kingdom Come, and you know that.