Applauding While Lebanon Burns (NORMAN SOLOMON)on Richard Cohen

[laststeamtrain]

Richard Cohen's Blood Lust
Applauding While Lebanon Burns

By NORMAN SOLOMON

<snip>

"Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness," he wrote. "For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights."

<snip>

In a column with bigoted overtones ("Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood"), Cohen's eagerness to support additional large-scale bombing by Israel is thematic. Consider this passage: "Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed suicide bomber over the border -- all that is needed is the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it's either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price."

<snip>

Cohen -- like so many others in the American punditocracy -- depicts the death of an Israeli civilian as far more tragic and important than the death of an Arab civilian.

There's something really sick about such righteous support for civilian death and destruction.

<snip>

http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon07262006.html

[Erika]

1. The ratio of dead Lebanese to dead Israelis is 10 to 1

For every 10 dead Lebanese, only one Israeli has died.

Paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

[springhill]

2. From the article:

Cohen -- like so many others in the American punditocracy -- depicts the death of an Israeli civilian as far more tragic and important than the death of an Arab civilian.

There's something really sick about such righteous support for civilian death and destruction.



Isn't that the truth.

[TomClash]

3. Hmm

"The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price."

By Anne Penketh in Gaza and Daniel Howden
Published: 27 July 2006

Only the bloodstains on their white shrouds spoke of the tragedy that had unfolded. Two Palestinian girls, one just eight months old, were dead. They were killed when an Israeli tank shell struck a house near Jabalya in the besieged Gaza Strip.

more... http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article...

[bemildred]

4. Well, the moral vacuuity of it is obvious.

Just turn it around:

"The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Israelis or the Americans understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price."