As you may well of heard, Palestinians have resorted to using human shields to deter Israeli millitary strikes. I don’t know the official international consensus on this, but the BBC had this to say -
“Palestinians can unite in confronting their enemy and the passive resistance of the human shields will be admired from around the world. ”
Admired?!
This should be condemned in the strongest terms. The only reason that this is even an issue is because Israel calls ahead of time to allow Palestinians to evacuate before airstrikes, so the strikes destroy only objects, not lives. Palestinians have cynically twisted this to prevent the destruction of weapons caches and millitant meeting areas. The BBC went so far as to call it “David and Goliath” (particularly ironic, considering David was a Jew, and Goliath came from the region around where Gaza is today). More like Achilles’ heel, with Israel’s heel being some shred of decency. (I can guarantee you that if Hamas could, they would deliberately target bunches of Israeli civilians akin to the ones they are using to deter airstrikes.) Of course Israel has done indecent things in the past, but their refusal to bomb people who are knowlingly putting themselves in harms way while Israeli civilians just living life are getting hit by rockets puts them a step above Hamas. Israel is the real ‘hero’ in this situation, not Hamas.
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From Ha’aretz
“What a long way we have come since the time when we took pride in the fact that, unlike the Arabs, we tried not to kill innocent civilians. And now we have arrived at the shocking reality of the second Lebanon war. For example, the number of people Israel killed is not only almost 10 times higher than the number of people Hezbollah killed, but the number of soldiers Hezbollah killed is three times higher than the number of Israeli civilians they killed, while the number of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel is about three times the number of Hezbollah fighters. So whose arms are purer?”
Neither side is being “decent”.
Imagine that – in a war that took place with Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, more Lebanese civilians and Israeli soldiers died than vice versa. If Israel had the same scruples as Hamas (or Hezbollah, for that matter), there would be a pile of dead civilians where right now there is a human shield. Tell me that Hamas would not bomb that if they could? And yet Israel doesn’t. Granted, they are certainly not ‘pure’. But in this showdown, they are being much more decent than Hamas, and yet Hamas is getting the praise, at least from the BBC.
Its good as your other articles : D, thankyou for putting up.
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