The Hypocrisy Of The West Is Exposed By Their Separate Morality For Israel

Israel is conducting a war against an entrenched enemy that has had more than 15 years to prepare the battle space. Its enemy has no regard for civilian casualties, and in fact makes tactical decisions to maximize those casualties for propaganda purposes. Their enemy does not abide by the accepted rules of war...they wear no common uniform; they hide amongst civilians; they torture and kill captured soldiers and civilians; and their infrastructure is blended into an urban setting so that it is impossible to target military objectives without striking supposed civilian facilities, homes, schools, etc.

Yet miraculously, Israel has managed to minimize civilian deaths to an extent rarely seen in any battle, much less a war. The hysterical Western media report the death toll as calculated by the Gaza Health Ministry as if it were some unimpeachable number. At the same time they examine under a microscope, every statement from Israel and its military, and loudly proclaim the supposed errors as proof of some nefarious plot to deceive. Yet even accepting the obvious nonsense being pumped into a gullible Western media by the terrorist organization Hamas, Israel has kept civilian casualties to a minimum.

A more bloodthirsty country would have leveled Gaza and killed many times the number of civilians who have died. Imagine if Russia or China had suffered an equivalent terrorist attack on its border. Or for that matter if a large force of narco-terrorists had crossed into Texas or New Mexico or Arizona or California from Mexico and raped and burned and murdered 48,000 American citizens. The clamor for an all-out assault on Mexico and the use of every weapon at our disposal would have been intense and unstoppable.

Yet Israel has resisted the urge -- if it even exists -- for wholesale slaughter. And it's doing an incredible job while under tremendous pressure from the United States and other Western countries to either cease military operations, or scale them back to token attacks on obvious concentrations of terrorists.

Here is Edward N. Luttwak discussing the amazing job that Israel is doing:

Why Israel Is Winning in Gaza

Israel has a fair amount of field artillery in the form of the common 155 mm caliber gun-howitzers, just like the U.S. and other Western armies. But it also has much smaller, much cheaper Israeli-made 160 mm heavy mortars that deliver 30 kilos of high explosives at shorter ranges. The Israelis should have used them abundantly in the Gaza fighting, because parabolic fire is just the thing in urban warfare, but did not because of their own avoidance of collateral casualties … and because of continued alarms and warnings from the U.S.

That was most certainly the case with the exceedingly restrained, indeed inadequate use of Israel’s air power in Gaza. In the 1991 “Desert Storm” attack on Iraq, for which I received a letter of commendation from U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak for target selection before and during the bombing, I never deliberately selected a civilian target. But I do not recall anyone ever telling me that a valuable military target must not be attacked because there may be civilian casualties. But in Gaza, the Israeli air force was hardly allowed to contribute more than a fraction of its strength to the fighting, in deference to the insistent requests coming from the White House.

The real issue though is that the rest of the Western powers so hell-bent on hamstringing Israel in its existential fight against terrorism would never hold themselves or any other country to such impossible standards. There is a long list of wars just in this century in which civilians were killed at shockingly high rates with nary a peep from the bien pensants in Washington and London and Paris. Iraq and Afghanistan saw huge civilian suffering, and in fact the numbers of refugees created by those wars are not afforded a tenth of the money and media coverage that refugees from the Israeli War of Independence --75 YEARS AGO! -- are given.

Israel is acting in an amazingly moral way in the midst of shocking and almost unbelievable brutality. The country has coalesced around the goal of making itself safe from the terrorists on its southern and northern borders, while adhering to standards of behavior that are a credit to its social fabric, 3,000 year history, and the moral code of Judaism.

posted by CBD at 12:00 PM

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