Eat up, National Post tells LTTE hunger strikers
The following is the full text of an editorial
published by Canada's National Post Thursday:
The ongoing Parliament Hill protests and hunger strikes by Tamil
Canadians are meant to stir our lawmakers into action against Sri Lanka,
whose government is waging a successful military campaign against the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), better known as the Tamil
Tigers. If anything, however, the protests have had the opposite effect:
Just as radical Canadian Muslims attract disgust when they raise the
flags of Hezbollah or Hamas, so too do Tamils who fly the flag the of
the LTTE, a terrorist insurgency that once controlled much of Sri Lanka.
What worse, the protesters have flown the LTTE flag alongside the
Canadian flag an insult to our own country.
As we have written several times before, we are not without sympathy
for the cause of the Tamil people, many of whom have been treated as
second-class citizens by the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo.
Indeed, the Tamils would have had a rightful claim to the world
sympathy if the LTTE, which fights for an independent Tamil homeland,
hadn't itself adopted such inhumane tactics since its formation in the
1980s. The Tigers perfected the tactic of suicide bombing, deploying
explosive-wrapped killers by the dozens even before the practice had
caught on in the Arab world.
The LTTE has also press-ganged children as young as 10 into military
service and, following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, they cleared out
orphanages for foot soldiers and interdicted relief supplies to feed
their adult insurgents and fund terror campaign against the Sri Lankan
government. The sight of this group flags flying in Canada is nothing
short of revolting.
Canada is home to the largest expatriate Tamil community in the
world.
Despite the Conservative government decision to declare the LTTE a
terrorist organization in 2006, many of the most prominent Tamil groups
in Canada remain fronts for the Tigers.
Much of the money for the LTTE terror campaign has been extorted from
Tamil Canadians, who have faced harassment if they show insufficient
enthusiasm for the Tigers. Family members back home in Sri Lanka have
even been held hostage until Tamils here pay hefty donations.
The reason that Tiger supporters seem so desperate now is that, after
nearly 17 months of bloody fighting, Sri Lankan troops have the few
hundred remaining Tiger fighters pinned down inside a few square
kilometres in northeast Sri Lanka including, possibly, the group
sociopathic leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
The only thing preventing Sri Lankan troops from finishing off the
Tigers is the presence of thousands of Tamil civilians, whom the Tigers
are using as human shields.
Like Hamas in Gaza, cowardly LTTE fighters are hiding behind the
women and children they claim to be protecting. (In fact, the Tigers are
actually killing civilians who try to flee the combat area something
even Hamas never did on a large scale during the Gaza combat.) The
Tigers goal appears to be saving itself and we would not be surprised if
Pirapaharan staged his own massacre of Tamils as a means to discredit
Colombo and force a ceasefire that allowed him to escape.
The Ottawa protesters and others in Sydney, Australia insist the
Colombo government is readying a genocide against Tamils. Many
journalists are even getting e-mails from Tiger supporters claiming that
the Sri Lankan army is preparing to use chemical weapons.
This is preposterous: If government troops truly wanted to stage a
genocide, they could have done so weeks ago.
The only reason that the siege has drawn out this long is that Sri
Lanka army wishes to avoid unnecessary slaughter. Indeed, the Tamils who
have managed to escape the Tiger area report being treated better by Sri
Lankan troops than they were by the LTTE.
If the Tiger supporters in Ottawa truly had the best interests of
innocent Tamils at heart, they would be pleading with the Tigers
themselves to release their human shields, not declaring their undying
support for a terror organization.
Our advice to the Ottawa hunger strikers is: Eat up. To the extent
anyone is listening to your message, it only serves to disgrace your
members.
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