Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
threat to world peace →
supporting Israel’s worst policies
I don’t often bring up the quicksand-issue of Israel here on The Picket Line, but… we’re paying for it…
The funding will come from the U.S. military aid to Israel…
That’s right: they’re buying the bombs from U.S. weapons manufacturers with money that U.S. taxpayers are giving them.
Government sources said the bomb deal, one of the largest weapons deals of recent years, did not face any political difficulties, despite the use Israel has made of U.S.-made F-16s in some of its assassinations in the territories.
The IDF used a one-ton bomb to kill a senior Hamas officer, Salah Shehadeh, in , an assassination that also took the lives of 15 Palestinian civilians, including children.
I continue to be struck by how people morally evaluate the killing of innocent people.
There’s an implicit heuristic at work that includes the race or nationality of the perpetrator and victim, whether or not that person was part of a uniformed and organized military force, how expensive and high-tech was the equipment used, and whether the perpetrator and victim might have been able to look each other in the eye.
I sometimes wish that this heuristic could be made explicit, because I think people would disavow much of it then.
More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip.
It’s no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children “terror.” Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1.
According to B’Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers:
598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent.
Take note of the ages, too.
According to B’Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died.
The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli.
Yet it is not on the public agenda.
Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
With America choosing the Israeli path of peacemaking by attempting to conquer, subdue, and humiliate our enemies (a path that, to be fair, they might well have learned through emulating American policy by playing Cowboys & Indians), we can start asking those questions too.
While 150% of Israeli children’s deaths had resulted in headline coverage (some deaths generated multiple stories), only 5% of Palestinian children’s deaths received similar coverage.
