Let us call the childrens' deaths in Qana what they are: a horrific freak of war. They were not intended; they were not actively sought; and they were not the product of criminal negligence. In weeks of war and thousands of sorties against a foe that intentionally hides amongst civilians in the active hope of just this manner of carnage, the remarkable fact is that this hasn't happened before. Contrary to founding advocates of airpower -- and unlike its battlefield foes -- Israel does not seek the death of civilians for their own sake. Pace the rationalizations extended to Allied aircrews obliterating Western European villagers unfortunate enough to live near a rail junction, Israel does not even regard acceptance of this manner of death -- unintended, incidental, and not worth especial efforts to preclude -- as acceptable within the moral parameters of war. The uninformed and the insane will react with bitter derision upon being told this, on the heels of the news from Qana: but their emotional self-indulgence does not negate the fact at hand.
Need it be said -- and it is a sign of our fallen age that it does need to be said -- Israel's enemy in this war operates under no such constraint. (One assumes that in bygone days, the difference between a Western democracy and a band of murderous savages would not need repeated explanation.) Hezbollah and the average Islamist do not shrink from direct assaults on civlians as such and as an end in itself. Indeed, it has been their sole tactic in this entire war. If they have not produced scenes of masses of dead children, it is not for lack of trying -- it is, after all, the only thing they try for. That they have not managed it is indicative of the confluence of blind luck and Israeli battlefield superiority. But give it time: give it infinite time to launch its rockets and try its luck, as the braying proponents of ceasefire would have it, and eventually we'll see Jewish children, too, incinerated in their sleep. The difference, of course, is that the perpetrators then will celebrate.
In a sane world, we would give thanks for Hezbollah's failure to murder, regret what has happened in Qana, and reaffirm the justice of the Israeli war. But this is not a sane world: in place of right and wrong, too many appear to operate in a universe of strong and weak (or, one suspects, Jew and non-Jew) -- and their sympathy goes to the weak, even if the weak is a shell of a polity married to a genocide-minded Muslim murder-front. For those of us with our sanity intact, we have but one message this morning for the IAF: keep bombing.
Tacitus on the death of children
Monday July 31, 2006
From Tacitus:
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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"Israel is losing the battle of public opinion not only by various attacks but by the preposterous evasions of responsibility and grotesque, ludicrous attempts at blame-shifting."
I cannot say whether the current suspicions of Hizbollah setting up the deaths in Qana have merit. SOME of them are certainly worth investigating, and Grace's insistence that Israel not do so is itself grotesque and ludicrous.
The large, intricate, multi-colored, professionally produced banner that appeared shortly after the building collapsed (in which Condoliza Rice is blamed for "Qana massacres") is certainly suspicious, as professionals here in the U.S. have stated that such a banner could not have been produced that quickly. I have no idea if this is true, but it's worth investigating.
Furthermore, while I generally expect politicians (Israeli, American, French) to lie or evade, Israel does have reason to suspect a set-up, for the simple reason that such set-ups and media shows have been a continuous feature of the war against Israel since the beginning of the Second Intifada.
During WWII (the good war) the Allies bombed civilian populations. Some historians have suggested that Roosevelt insisted on the deliberate bombing of civilians, to soften up the population for a future invasion. Thousands of German civilians (including children) were killed. I don't know if this accusation is true (that civilians were among the deliberate targets) but it does not change my belief regarding who was the aggressor and who was the defender; who was right and who was evil.
Nor should the current tragedy in Qana, staged or not, change any sane, moral person's attitude about the ongoing Arab/Muslim wars to extinguish the state of Israel.>
The large, intricate, multi-colored, professionally produced banner that appeared shortly after the building collapsed (in which Condoliza Rice is blamed for "Qana massacres") is certainly suspicious
Not quite the same thing, but this reminds me of the incident during the first Gulf War (BTW, what are we going to end up calling the current war in Iraq? The Second Gulf War?) when the US bombed a building thought to be housing munitions, but which the Iraqis claimed was a baby milk factory. I particularly remember the TV footage of the site after the bombing, which prominently featured a sign saying "Baby Milk Factory".
In English.
Only in English.
What made it an even more blatant attempt to pander to Western news coverage was that the sign was crude and hand-lettered. Obviously, they've learned since then. And, of course, there have been 15 years' worth of advances in computer graphics and quick-printing technology.>
Remove the settlements, create a coherent Palestian state, and you've cut the Arab extremism off at its roots.
Which explains Hezbollah ... how? They're not even Palestinian. They're Lebanese. And they want Israel gone. For that matter, so does Hamas. It doesn't want a Palestinian state, except where Israel is, and Judenfrei. Both groups openly state it, and brag about it.
The world is not what y'all think it is.>
You know, that talking point is wearing a little thin, a week and 500 civilian deaths into this mess.
Yep.
Diane>
Read your history, Rod.
Hezbollah was founded in 1985 to get Israel out of southern Lebanon.
Israel was in southern Lebanon to attack the PLO.
And we all know who the PLO are, right? PALESTINIAN Liberation Organization ... which in 1988 recognized Israel's right to exist and called for the two-state solution.
I really do believe the solution of the Palestian problem is fundamental to solving problems with the Arabs and the Islamic world in general. But Israel is intransigent on the West Bank settlements.
And so we go, round and round, where we stop, nobody knows.>
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