I wrote among other pleasantries: > > > 2. Look up the word "irony". >
And Alan wrote: > OK, if you meant your comments to be ironic, then please give us your frank > and non-ironic opinion of the hijacking of ambulances by Palestinian gunmen. > > This is assuming, just for the sake of argument, that the events depicted in > the video clip are factual and not simply a fabrication. > No, you go first, Alan. I insist. And you can do one more thing. We have had a lot of discussion of atrocities and the like here of late. So you take the above, the hijacking of ambulances, and you score it on a scale of 1 to 10 from less to more heinous, along with the following: 1. Hamas' firing of rockets into Israel, which has resulted in 5 deaths at last count. 2. The killing of more than 500 people in Gaza, mostly civilians and many of whom were women and children, by the IDF (and not in retaliation for the firing of rockets, mind you; the ceasefire broke down for the reasons already noted in the pieces cited here by Ha'aretz, Helena Cobban, Sarah Roy, etc., and the same was stated in an article in the "Economist" in November 2008) 3. The dropping of cluster bombs on civilians in southern Lebanon by the IDF, not once but repeatedly over the years. I deplore all of the above, but the disproportion in the Israeli use of force is obvious to anyone with a pulse, Alan. And it is wrong to portray poor little Israel as always responding to provocations from terrorists - these are not terrorists, but the inhabitants of their ancestral lands or refugees pushed into squalid camps by Israel, whatever anyone thinks of their tactics, and any peaceful solution to this problem will have to involve them, as Aaron David Miller rightly argues - and just risible to depict Israel as overwrought about the moral dilemma posed by fighting "terrorists" surrounding themselves with "human shields". Even the use of the term "human shields", derived from the first Gulf War when actual foreign hostages were taken by Saddam Hussein, is farcical in this context. And as an American, I also deplore our country's role in this, both in facilitating this by providing the weaponry and then urging Israel on. John Marchioro --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
