This is starting to get, to put it mildly, alarming. In an apparent declaration of war, Israel has amped up its attacks in Gaza, and the death toll is rising rapidly.
Warplanes pounded Gaza for a fourth day on Tuesday as tanks stood by to join the “all-out” war Israel vowed would wipe out Hamas, and the Palestinian death toll rose to at least 360.
Israel made it clear Monday the offensive was just beginning, even as UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged world leaders to work urgently to end the “unacceptable” violence.
As I idly predicted in my last post, we’re already seeing right-wing maniacs finding severely mangled logic in order to condone Israel’s actions.
The question is whether the Palestinian people are educable. Which brings me back to the first point: the Palestinians voted to put in power — i.e., vest with the power of a quasi-sovereign government — a terrorist organization which thinks legitimate governing consists of bringing about the annihilation of its sovereign neighbor and, meantime, targeting the said neighbor’s civilian population with bombing attacks. When you do that, you make yourself a target.
It’s one thing to defend Israel’s disproportionate attacks as a legitimate attempt to destroy Hamas’ capacity to launch rockets into Israel, but it’s quite another to defend them as an attempt to “educate” the Palestinian people. The former is debatable, the latter is a forthright embrace of terrorism, the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal.
This is where we see a rather fundamental divide ‘twixt the left and right in terms of Middle East policy and opinions. Forgive what may sound like hyperbole here…
Liberals and conservatives have both clung to purported humanitarian causes as instances in which the United States needs to get involved: Darfur for the liberals and Iraq for the conservatives. Both are centered around a brutalized and oppressed citizenry that, so the supporters say, need the help of the United States in order to be delivered from their plight.
Where things divide, though, is that the neocon war-nuts seem to be saying out of one side of their mouths that we need to deliver democracy to the Iraqis and out of the other that the Iraqis are primitive towelheads and we should turn the whole country into a parking lot. They have zero concern for torturing citizens and exhibit and almost frightening antipathy towards them in any real sense. The Palestinians don’t “deserve” saving because they elected Hamas, we should nuke Iran, it would have been easier to just burn Iraq to the ground instead of wasting time in a battle, and the region as a whole is a backwards Islamic radicalist cesspool that should be obliterated for the safety of mankind.
They seem to want it both ways, claiming to support the Iraq invasion for the sake of spreading democracy while screeching that everyone with a rug that faces east should be thrown in a dingy cell and starved and beaten until they tell us where they and their family plan on suicide bombing next. If I didn’t know better I’d think the profession of humanitarianism toward Iraqis was smoke and mirrors.
