From TPM Cafe:
Let’s see if I have this right. The Arab “terrorists” attack military units, destroy at least one tank, and are therefore terrorists. Israel retaliates by launching aerial, naval, and artillery bombardments of civilian areas and they are engaging in self-defense. If we are unable to recognize the hypocrisy of this construct then we ourselves are so enveloped by propaganda and emotion that, like the Israelis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, we can’t think rationally. We can only think in terms of tribalism and revenge.
82 (at least) to 4. That’s the Lebanese to Israeli civilian death toll from their fight.
39,000+ to, well, 0. That’s the Iraqi to US civilian death toll from their fight. Seeing as how Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11, I’m afraid I can’t hang those numbers on their heads.
Hezbollah made a stupid, indefensible move against Israel, and a response is expected and reasonable. But not this response.
Saddam Hussein was a stupid, indefensible despot and his people deserved something better. But not this thing.
Terrorists kill civilians as a means to apply pressure to a country, its leaders, and/or its people to change its ways. Though they have often been a target of this behavior themselves, Israel appears to be doing precisely that.
Ostensibly, the US wants to topple regimes like Saddam’s to protect its people from the possibility of another terrorist attack. But can we defend the deaths of almost 40,000 Iraqi civilians as reasonable when even the worst terrorist attack on US soil resulted in less than 3000 deaths?
Racism and prejudice swirl around the Israeli conflict on all sides. But we’re not immune, either. The only way you could justify the numerical disparity just described would be to say that Iraqi lives are worth less than American lives. I’m sure many conservatives would proudly champion a Christian American as worth more than 100,000 “Islamofascists,” but no one governed by rationality would ever see any of it in that light.
Most of us have been raised to believe Israel and America are the good guys, but it says here that good guys do everything they can to save innocent lives, not waste them, no matter what borders they live between.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz anti-semite
Wait, I thought this was DailyKos. My bad.
The entire Middle East situation is framed as “righteous democratic nations vs. dark-skinned, slavering, subhuman babykillers.” That’s how we justify this. Comparing the outright eliminationist rhetoric and actions of the Israelis with a certain previous state which did such things is considered the most horrible of anti-semitic claptrap.
Remember, before they started pounding Lebanon, Israel was already placing Gaza under siege. The Israelis have thousands of Palestinian prisoners (including civilians), but the Palestinians reply by capturing one Israeli soldier and the verdict is that they must be ground to dust.
Israel has already turned down a reasonable ceasefire from Lebanon. They’ve explicitly stated that the purpose of this war is to teach their enemies a lesson. Punitive warfare of that type is expressly forbidden by the UN, and something needs to be done about it now.
I know the right loves to say we hate America, but everytime I go to Iraqibodycount.net, I get this inner rage at the sheer bigotry inherent in the numbers. I get sick and I begin to hate America. Then I leave the site and go about my crappy business, while more and more people die elsewhere. I begin to hate myself as well.
Just a question, punkass marc. Did you mean to link to the BJ contest? If so, it worked to make the post less dark and soul-crushing, but it also hit home to me how sheltered and, indeed, oblivious we are here in the States. We’re dropping bombs on civilians daily and torturing people. And we’re also holding bullshit contests for women to win $100 by sucking cock. Irony is the new black.
Jack,
Um, oops. That link was for a post tomorrow. Thanks for the heads-up. Sometimes cut-and-paste betrays me.
I switched it, but yeah, actually, juxtaposed against what I was writing about here, that really says something. You may have just helped me for tomorrow…
You really shouldn’t mention iraqibodycount.com without mentioning that it’s methodology — only counting deaths reported in the media — cannot possibly be anything but a tremendous underestimate of the number of civillian deaths in Iraq.
FoolishOwl,
You’re right about that. But I feel like even its conservative numbers are so stunning that I don’t have to qualify it.
When even the safest projections cause shock and awe, you know things are bad.
That’s true. It is, nevertheless, important to point out that these are the conservative numbers — particularly in this case, where there’s been a campaign of arguing against the Lancet report and other estimates. The other day, I was looking for current estimates of civillian casualties, and as of a few months ago, all the mainstream news outlets stopped referring to any estimates but iraqbodycount.com’s, as if the Lancet report had never happened.
Noam Chomsky is really good on the way the enemy are “terrorists” and allies are not, here: http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20011018.htm
“That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts. One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn’t fail. It works. Violence usually works. That’s world history. Secondly, it’s a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it’s primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror.”
Well, hezbollargh just retaliated, at least 8 civilians dead in a rocket attack on an isreali coastal town.
The interesting thing is that the BBC headline is “Deadly Hezbollah attack on Haifa”, while this report about how Isreal has re-entered the Gaza Strip (oh, and killed three people in airstrikes) is titled simply “Isreal returns to northern Gaza”.
*sigh*
Yeah. This really, really isn’t working, is it?
Depends on the definition of “working.” It’s working…if our goal is to start WWIII.
Its working like a charm to destroy what little of democracy we have here, providing endless excuses for executive over ride and control of information. Terrorism is no different than every other excuse meted out by a dictatorial government to excuse further stripping of civil rights of its own people and the continued slaughter and exploitation of ‘enemies’ within its reach.
What always amazes me about the news of the “Isreali conflict” is that no effort has ever been made in the media or even in public education to tell the real story of the development of Isreal. Most common Americans think Isreal as a state has been around since bible times and has been suffering the persecution of its evil neighbors since the time Moses parted the Red Sea.
But alas, what else can we expect but fascist tendencies from a culture that absolutely despises critical thinking, analysis and education? I really need to brush up on my foreign language skills, just which language I haven’t yet decided. French?
Marc, all four of your numbers are too low. The latest numbers on Israel are about 150/12; the number of non-Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq is about 200 (think beheadings); and the number of Iraqi civilians killed is, by my estimate, about 200,000.
Kate, the problem with telling the “real story” is that there isn’t one. There’s the official account, and there’s the Chomsky/Said version. It’s like trying to glean the truth about the Cold War when all you have is Pravda and Voice of America. As for which language you should learn, in the long run it’s Mandarin. In the short run, British English will probably suffice…
At least some of the non-Iraqi civillians aren’t really civillians. The most notorious of the killings of “civillian” contractors was the killing of four members of Blackwater USA, a mercenary organization.
Well, regardless of Marc’s numbers, it’s all EXTREMELY fucked up. The numbers are not the issue.
You know, I’ve always wondered how people who were the object of such awfulness (I can’t really think of a word bad enough to even describe it) could justify putting another group through something even remotely close to what they suffered. It just doesn’t make sense to me, but every time I’ve made that point in the company of anyone other than my husband, I get treated like I’ve just made the most anti-semitic comment possible.
Not all jews were in the camps ks, Israel was formed and run for most of its early history by what can only be called hardcore, ultra-zionist religious whackjob terrorists (not hyperbole, they used to blow up passenger trains and stuff during the colonial days until 1949) who were pissing around in the middle east while the deaths in the concentration camps of europe that they used to their poltical advantage after the war, were going on. To them the holocaust is really just an excuse that enables their entirely selfish actions and politics, they never learned from history, and are doomed to repeat it.
If they invented a ray gun that could destroy just the sociopathic opportunists in a population while leaving the sane folk unharmed, and they used such a ray on the middle east, the entire region would be without any form of government or militant organisations.
From Zionism: False Messiah:
I do realize that not all Jews were in the camps, but that was a genocide aimed at them and if Hitler could have somehow rounded them all up from everywhere, I’m sure he would have. But my point was, and I’m a horrible writer so I’m sure it got lost somewhere, was that the Israeli government plays that particular card whenever they need to excuse/justify whatever horrible thing they want to do. And it seems that, as I’m sure at least some of the citizens of that country were or had family members in the camps, they would be outraged at it. And maybe it’s just that I’m reading the wrong sources or that US media under-reports it (both of which are entirely likely), but I have yet to hear of much outrage.
And your ray gun comment made me laugh. It would probably work the same way over here as well.
I do have to take issue with the complaint about militant organizations: when you’re the target of a campaign of genocide, organizing and taking up arms is a reasonable course of action.
[...] In a surreal cut-and-paste snafu, I accidentally posted the contest link as part of my Killing Civilians to Protect Civilians post. JackGoff had this to say, and I think it sums things up nicely: Just a question, punkass marc. Did you mean to link to the BJ contest? If so, it worked to make the post less dark and soul-crushing, but it also hit home to me how sheltered and, indeed, oblivious we are here in the States. We’re dropping bombs on civilians daily and torturing people. And we’re also holding bullshit contests for women to win $100 by sucking cock. Irony is the new black. [...]