Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic rounds up what he says are exposes of the Irish and British double standards: Dublin and London expelled Israeli diplomats because Israel allegedly used forged Irish and British passports in the Dubai assassination, but have yet to do so subsequent to the discovery that Russia has done same.
I’m not sure I see it. The Dubai assassination was, well, an assassination. The Russian spies in the United States — what is it exactly they were doing? Even they didn’t seem sure.
I’m not making a moral distinction here between "murder" and who knows what, as commenters on Niall O’Dowd’s IrishCentral page do. Mahmoud el-Mabhouh was no innocent bystander.
But there is a distinction between using assumed identities for surreptitious travel, and for killing. (The spy known as Richard Murphy used Eunan Doherty’s identity to sneak back to Moscow unnoticed by U.S. authorities.)
Both actions place the innocents whose identities have been stolen at risk, to be sure — but one considerably more than the other.
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