Friday, January 30, 2009
Ever Slimming Time Magazine Becomes Propaganda Arm of Hamas
This report in Time is one of the myriad examples of recent airing in our media of unfiltered, unchecked stories from Gaza residents of how wantonly terrible the IDF was. I don't believe that IDF soldiers shot and murdered these women and children just as the article claims. The first thing I want to know is whether the wound trails in the dead are 5.56mm or 7.62mm in diameter. Until Time establishes that fact, this story is suspect.
The moral of the story, in any event, is when the IDF tells you to leave an area where Hamas is firing rockets into Israel, maybe you should.
The collateral damage in Gaza, and there had to be some--war really sucks for civilians in a war zone--is almost exclusively the result of where Hamas chooses to put its war crime rocket launchers and where and how it chooses to fight. As this Dershowitz analogy makes clear, when a criminal takes a hostage to shield him while he is killing others, if the police sharpshooter kills the shielding hostage while trying to kill the criminal in order to protect others, the hostage's death is the criminal's fault, not the police's. Not everyone is Carlos Hathcock.
I hope that my unwillingness to believe this story is not a result of prejudice; indeed, I usually am willing to believe first hand accounts of things I don't want to believe, unless the source has lied to me before. And the Palestinians have lied before to the world, and therefore to me too, about their casualties. Mona Charon talks about some of those lies here. So the Palestinians in this story start out in the hole because of other Palestinian liars.
The moral of the story, in any event, is when the IDF tells you to leave an area where Hamas is firing rockets into Israel, maybe you should.
The collateral damage in Gaza, and there had to be some--war really sucks for civilians in a war zone--is almost exclusively the result of where Hamas chooses to put its war crime rocket launchers and where and how it chooses to fight. As this Dershowitz analogy makes clear, when a criminal takes a hostage to shield him while he is killing others, if the police sharpshooter kills the shielding hostage while trying to kill the criminal in order to protect others, the hostage's death is the criminal's fault, not the police's. Not everyone is Carlos Hathcock.
I hope that my unwillingness to believe this story is not a result of prejudice; indeed, I usually am willing to believe first hand accounts of things I don't want to believe, unless the source has lied to me before. And the Palestinians have lied before to the world, and therefore to me too, about their casualties. Mona Charon talks about some of those lies here. So the Palestinians in this story start out in the hole because of other Palestinian liars.
Labels: Arab Israeli Conflict; Gaza front
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:12 AM 
