These include fascism in Ukraine, police brutality in Peru, high-level corruption in Malaysia, arrests of Muslims for their political views throughout Europe, mass human rights violations in Indonesia and prison overcrowding and police murder sprees in Brazil, Greenwald said.
‘Bogus!’ – Kremlin spokesman on HRW accusations of civilians killed in Russian airstrikes https://t.co/ryGYR0aTFI pic.twitter.com/ogQhNe054I
— RT (@RT_com) 26 октября 2015
His seemingly absurd argument had a point, however: he was illustrating how the American press was quick to launch allegations at Russia without addressing America's own faults. According to Greenwald, it is pointless to seek explanations in "the highly selective moral outrage expressed by Sam Charles Hamad," due to the "incredibly deceitful, miserably common, intellectually bankrupt tactic that the Daily Beast just aired: smearing people not for what they write, but for what they don't write."
"It's something I encounter literally every day, almost always as an expression of the classic "whataboutism" fallacy, designed to distract attention from one's own crimes," Greenwald pointed out.
He referred to the notorious history of this tactic in the United States, which dates back to the "height of McCarthyism — of declaring people suspect or morally unhealthy due to a failure to condemn Russia with sufficient vigor and frequency."
"For decades in the US, one could be accused of being a 'Kremlin sympathizer' without ever having uttered a syllable of support for Russia, and that's still just as true today," Greenwald said.
Moscow has denied White House claims that it bombed Medecins Sans Frontieres hospitals in Syria, and MSF officials have noted that none of its staff in Syria had reported that its facilities were targeted by airstrikes.
