Monday, July 31, 2006
Fantasy
Oliver North is up to his old tricks on Fox, saying that he’s not sure if Israel even bombed Qana, and “whether they did it or not” they “are going to get blamed for it.”
You have got to be kidding me, people. How many crimes to you have to be convicted of, how many lies do you have to tell before you lose your place in the conservative media? How ridiculous do you have to be before the audience stops watching?
Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, maintained that “We are paying a very precious and almost unbearable loss of life, major damage to public and private property and tranquility—and we’re not prepared to give up our right to live perfectly ordinary lives.” Here we see Israeli moral relativism in all its glory. Israel’s losses of 51 civilians and military personnel is “almost unbearable.” How does he judge the 500+ civilian fatalities in Lebanon? He speaks of “major damage to public and private property and tranquility,” but how does he measure the billions of dollars in damage in Lebanon that dwarf the damage done to his country? The 500,000 to 700,000 refugees in Lebanon that are ten times the number of dislocated people in Israel? Do Lebanese civilians just not count? More Lebanese children have died than all of Israel’s fatalities put together. Is their loss bearable?
Apparently they are bearable, as Israel’s Justice Minister said the IDF had given Lebanese ample time to leave southern Lebanon and anyone remaining could be considered a supporter of Hezbollah—and fair game. “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah,” he said, according to the BBC, on July 27th.
Forget about trying to leave and being blocked by bombed out bridges. Forget about having nowhere to go, or having to stay behind to care for sick or injured friends or relatives who can’t be moved. As Human Rights Watch has said, most of those left behind are “unable to flee due to destroyed roads, a lack of gasoline, high taxi fares, sick relatives, or ongoing Israeli attacks. The sick and poor are those who mostly remain behind.”
Forget about it. If you are left behind you are meat as far as Israel is concerned. What we are seeing in southern Lebanon is a free-fire zone.
Human Rights Watch, while also documenting Hezbollah’s obviously indiscriminant attacks, has unleashed a blistering criticism of Israel’s rampantly indiscriminant firing. Peter Bouckaert, Emergencies Director for Human Rights Watch, called Israel’s justifications of its actions “fantasy.” He wrote “I have seen my share of modern wars, as a researcher at Human Rights Watch. In Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, we found many civilian casualties due to bombing campaigns. Civilians fleeing attacks were hit by mistake. In Iraq, US bombs often hit civilian homes, hours after Saddam Hussein or members of his inner circle had left, missing their legitimate targets but killing civilians. In Lebanon it is a very different picture. Time after time, Israel strikes at civilian homes and civilian vehicles attempting to flee the besieged southern border zone, killing families without any military objective in sight…Although mistakes are made in the fog of fighting, the pattern of Israeli behavior in southern Lebanon suggests a deliberate policy…our investigations have not found evidence to support Israeli allegations that Hizbullah are intentionally endangering Lebanese civilians by systematically fighting from civilian positions.”
It reminds me of one of Noam Chomsky’s quotes: “You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.”
And another: “Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:53 PM 
