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[quote=Anonymous]The shooting down of MH17 is horrific and a tragedy.

But this is not an isolated incident because it has happened previously but the outcry has varied. There was similar outrage when the then Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines plane. There was less outrage when the US shot down an Iranian passenger airplane and Israel shot down a Libyan Airlines passenger plane.

So amidst all the outrage being expressed at the latest tragedy, it is not an isolated case by any means and the condemnation of such incidents has not always been the same.

I think it is generally agreed that the shooting down of MH17 was an accident in that whoever did it was not seeking to down a passenger airplane - which is what transpired at least in some of the other cases.

Excerpts from the below link:[i]

Iran Air Flight 655, flying over the Persian Gulf and bound for Dubai, was shot down by an American naval warship, killing all 290 people on board. According to Navy officials, the ship, which had been exchanging fire with Iranian vessels, fired missiles at the plane because the crew mistook it for a F-14 fighter jet. The government in Tehran didn't see the shooting as an accident, and the incident caused political ramifications that resonate to this day.

Headed from New York to Seoul, KAL Flight 007 was shot down by the Soviet Union near Moneron Island. After leaving Anchorage to make the last leg of its journey, the plane drifted slightly off course and edged into Soviet airspace. The Boeing 747 didn’t look too different on radar from the RC-135s that the US government used for surveillance in the area, prompting the Russians to scramble a fighter jet that fired two missiles at Flight 007, killing all 269 passengers and crew members onboard.

The (Libyan)aircraft was shot down by Israel after instrument failure and bad weather caused the flight to veer off course. The Boeing 727 departed from Tripoli, Libya, and was on its way to Cairo, Eygpt. But after a short stop in Benghazi, it ran into a sandstorm and headed into the Sinai desert, controlled by the Israeli government after the Six Day War. [/i]

[url]http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/malaysia-airlines-ukraine-crash-mh17-planes-military-shot-down[/url]

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