Peace campaigner compares London riots with UK wars

The British government has no moral high ground to condemning the 'sickening violence' of rioters on UK streets while supporting military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, according to Robin Beste of Stop the War Coalition (STWC). “It in no way justifies or excuses the rioting witnessed in London this week to say that some forms of thuggery, theft and criminality seem more worthy of condemnation than others,” Beste said. “A brick thrown through a shop window, a furniture store torched, a bus burnt out, certainly warrant condemnation, but it's hard to imagine that David Cameron would condemn the devastation and mass slaughter visited on Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade or the bombing of Libya as sickening violence,” he said. The British prime minister has adopted a “robust” policy to confront and defeat the worst riots in the UK in living memory and threatened to bring the “full force of law” against the perpetrators. “Which of the politicians now demanding that the London rioters must be subjected to the full weight of the law has said the same of Tony Blair, guilty of international war crimes in the lies and deceptions he used to take Britain into an illegal war,” Beste asked. “Where is the outrage that he has not been held to account and remains free to accumulate vast wealth directly from the political and business contacts he made when he was committing these crimes?” “On the contrary, this is the kind of 'sickening violence' that he and the majority of MPs now tripping over themselves to voice their outrage over the rioters trashing high streets across Britain, are quick to justify as motivated by the superiority of 'our values',” he said. “Many of the same MPs who voted along with the majority in parliament for the war that reduced much of Iraq to ruins and killed a million Iraqis, take to the moral high ground when alienated youths from our ghettoes of deprivation commit their mini-version of 'shock and awe'.” The peace campaigner also put into context the estimated £100 million cost of the clean-up of the riots, saying the amounts roughly how much has been spent on just 15 missiles among the dozens Britain's military has fired into Libya over the past few months. As for condemning the theft of looters stealing trainers, mobile phones and designer clothes from British shops during the riots, he contrasted this also with the so-call oil wars. “They are petty crooks compared to the thievery that has BP, with the aid of the western powers, quite literally stealing control of Iraq's most valuable resource: the oil which was the main motivation for the invasion in 2003,” Beste said. In a commentary for STWC, he expressed hope that there is now a real attempt at understanding and explaining why young people in deprived areas feel they have nothing to lose by collective acts of rampant vandalism.