The Demonizing of Israel: Nothing New

Israel & Palestine Forum

Stop Demonizing of Israel For Merely Defending Itself
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER


What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history that flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.

On Wednesday, CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead, it attacked dual-use infrastructure — bridges, roads, airport runways — and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten-thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. (letters@charleskrauthammer.com)

This piece of work advocated a combination of realist and neoconservative foreign policy stances as the best way to defend American interests and spread democracy. It's that kind of rootin' tootin' cowboy diplomacy that egghead republicans are wrapping their minds around.

And of course he's going to write about Israel... the man, aside from being Jewish, has been on the subject for years supporting right-wing Israeli groups.

I blame myself for losing precious seconds reading it.

-HECK!

Shows the stupidity of the man that he talsk about the destruction of Tyre and then goes on to say Israel is using precsion weapons, if he had any sens or doen any research he would know that prescion weapons don't destroy cities unless the user is incompotent.

Israel: Damned if they do, damned if they don't. Par for the course.

I like KRAUTHAMMER, I watch him on Fox news almost every night. Well spoken gentleman.

Israel has done enough to ensure its appropriate for them to be demonised. There is a falsehood out there that Israel by default are an innocent nation. By this default, all action against Israel can therefore be viewed as unwarranted.
However, when you occupy your neighbours territory, humiliate them, destroy innocent people's homes to build settlements for Israelis that further eat up into their neighbours land, build up your military that predominantly includes US weaponary, nuclear, chemical and biological weaponary, while condeming other nations for sending guns and rockets to resistance groups, drop bombs on shelters protecting children, bring humanitarian disaster to nations (plural) while blaming the nations themselves for their suffering at your hand....then you deserve to be demonised at the very least.
Israel is a terrorist state. Israel deserves to be dragged through every court on this planet to answer for the suffering it has brought innocent people, innocent people who cannot sufficiently defend themselves. If retaliation has become dirty, it is only because Israel leaves no other option open. What indeed suffices to an Israeli as legitimate resistance against foreign occupation? This is a question that deserves answers, because the west tends to think that neighbouring arab countries should simply allow Israel to destroy them altogether. All the while Israel suffers from an impending doom complex it plays against the guilt ridden west. Yet it is they who do the very most of the destroying in the first place.
And your actions have created the enemies you fear so expressively. Today you create tomorrows "terrorist". Yet you disregard the root cause of your problems because you cannot take responsibility for them. That you yourself could be at fault for the need for resistance at all flies by comprehension and merely lands on the laps of the innocent who collectively suffer for YOUR WAR. Lebanon has every right to defend itself. Moreso than Israel for Lebanon does not occupy parts of Israel. It does not stretch its borders into foreign land. Israel does. This notion that this crisis is about Israel retaining the right to defend itself flies in the face of the ongoing occupied, who have yet to be recognised the right to defend themselves from foreign occupation. Yet it is ok for the occupier to defend itself by further destroying the occupied. I do not see any justice or righteousness in that, for that is sick. And those who support such hypocritcal inhumanity deserve nothing but contempt. Israel is no victim.

Now, if anyone has a link to a good site about chemical weapons with more then conjecture - link it.

The following is something else, not related to the current crisis - i just liked the comment about the bio degree.

*****
It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran "showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh ... The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact." These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed "a biology degree

, too, possess a biology degree, and I am as well qualified to determine someone's cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that "nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition". We don't yet know how these people died.


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Let us take this sentence:
These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed "a biology degree

Me too. or at least i will have - and just by looking at something like that, even with a biology degree - you would not be able to tell what caused that

Iranian President calls for destruction of Israel. Ahmadinejad says destroying Israel will resolve the problems in the Middle East. More Demonizing of Israel: Nothing New.

Enemies of Israel want their destruction, true, that is nothing new.

It's one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...


-HECK!

Israel needs some Iocane Poison.

France breaks with U.S. and joins with Arab states demanding Israel leave Lebanon now. What took the frogs so long?

What's happening? Tony dropped his trousers and bent over for George once AGAIN! by standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush's stance on Israel's attack on Lebanon (the only country in the world to do so), and yet George sees fit to ignore him and get the agreement sorted out with FRANCE!

How's that for gratitude? Yo Blair! When are you going to learn, Bush doesn't give a s*** what you think. Woof woof! whimper whimper...

Enjoy the holidy, ya stupid putz!