Imagine 380 American civilians dead, 1,000 wounded in 12 days

[BurtWorm]

while the government tries to shoot it out with al Qaeda. Why is this acceptable to American politicians of both parties when it's Lebanese civilians dying and being injured?

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=74201#

Meanwhile the Israeli offensive continued for the 12th straight day, bringing the overall death toll to at least 380 with over 1,000 wounded, according to Lebanese authorities.

[feduppuke]

1. Because

Israel is attacking the area from which hundreds of rockets are being fired into their cities, including Haifa, the third largest in Israel?

If Canada knowlingly allowed a terrorist organization to house weapons in border towns, and that organization launched rockets into Chicago (our third largest city); few in the US would object to an invasion into the area those weapons were kept.

The difference between Israel and Hezbollah is that Israel, at least, tries to avoid civilians. Hezbollah targets them.

[blonndee]

2. You have no way of knowing what Israel tries to do.

Only what they SAY they try to do, and what they actually do.

[CuteNFuzzy]

4. exactly

[Name removed]

11. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[BurtWorm]

5. A bunch of nutcases objected when the US went after David Koresh

when FTA agents were attacked.

Imagine Canada dropping bombs on New York to stop Qaeda from lobbing missiles at it from northern Maine. Would we tolerate that? Would we tolerate the US bombing Toronto to stop Qaeda from bombing Chicago from Manitoba?

[Nimrod2005]

3. Dark skin Lebanese and no oil in Lebanon, Bush the lesser would

have drawn a "line in the sand" had this been Qatar, Dubai, Ireland, or Denmark!!!

[newportdadde]

6. Actually you need to take that as a percentage of Lebanesse

population and use that percentage to determine how many people would die in the US to get the appropirate number.

As an example Iraq which has a much smaller population then the US has its own 9/11s every few days if you add together deaths from car bomb attacks etc.

[BurtWorm]

8. True.

[neoblues]

12. Or consider such numbers to have been from you own city...

Of course, such tricks don't always get the desired results... for instance, figuring how many Israelis (eight, for example) have been killed by Hezbollah, and translating it to the population of Madison, WI, for example, results in one quarter of a Madisonian. That rather underestimates the effect. The link has a useful discussion of when such comparisons are useful and when they aren't and why. Anyway, if we were talking about Miami, the number of mortalities suffered by Israel would be populationally (a new word?) equivalent to 11 Miami-ans.

However, scaling up, the damage to Israel relative to the population of the U.S. as a whole would be around 380 Americans killed. That's based on the fact that 0.00013 percent of Israel's population was killed (as of July 24). I suppose we'd react rather badly to such a number, yet the total in Israel seems sort of modest--certainly by comparison to the percentage ratios of people in Lebanon, which would be rather large numbers if translated to a U.S. equivalent (someone posted these calculations in a later post in this thread (actually, it's the next main post--one minute later than yours).

Go figure.

[BurtWorm]

13. I think if this government killed even 12 of its citizens,

even in an effort to kill Qaeda members, there would be national outrage.

(Oddly enough, though when Israel kills Americans who get in the way of their counter-terrorism campaigns, it doesn't stick in the public memory for long.)

[neoblues]

16. Somehow I'm not so sure...

I mean, that's certainly how it would have been... even as little as six years ago--when there was some semblance of sanity remaining (ie. pre-George Bush). Somehow, it seems to me that even now, there would be some outrage... but it would be muted or brief... and just as you mention about Americans who've managed to get killed elsewhere (the rationale being what? that since they weren't here, they were taking their chances, putting themselves at risk and so it's just an unfortunate accident?) not holding the public's attention, I would expect such a thing to be brief as well--certainly a bigger deal, but short-lived.

Indeed, I suspect the American "attention-span" has become so limited, that if space-aliens landed, a week later the top news items would be some nonsense about some girl somewhere who disappeared.

[kenny blankenship]

7. Scale it up in proportion to US population: 29,372 dead, 77,000 wounded

Approaching 38,700,000 (38.7 million) made refugees as the Southeastern US is emptied out and bombed to splinters.

[BurtWorm]

10. Exactly.

But even at the absolute Lebanese amounts, I think Americans would not be very tolerant.

Why are D&R politicians tolerant of Israel's collateral damage to Lebanon? Tolerant to the point of plain not caring? They have a gigantic moral blind spot when it comes to Israel.

[neoblues]

9. Partially off-topic: What if 570,000 Americans died since 2003?

That would probably get every American's attention and potentially cause them to actually become involved. Alas, it would probably be involvment in efforts to achieve just retribution on someone (and bring about a real world war III), instead of actually getting them to actually try to find out what's going on in the world and become politically active and responsible. Alas, that's my own bleak opinion. As for the number in the subject:

Proportionate Response
Does one Israeli really equal 47 Americans?
By Jordan Ellenberg
Posted Monday, July 24, 2006, at 12:29 PM ET

On June 25, Louise Roug and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "t least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. … Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years." Three weeks later on Meet the Press, Newt Gingrich asked viewers to "magine Miami had missiles being fired at it every day. Remember that when Israel loses eight people because of the difference in population, it's the equivalent of losing almost 500 Americans."

...

The first question is easier. Unless you truly think Israeli lives are worth more or less than our own, the crime that's equivalent to the murder of eight Israelis is the murder of eight Americans. But what Roug, Smith, and Gingrich have in mind is something closer to the latter question. Their equivalences are shorthand for something like "an attack killing X percent of Iraq's population has the same impact as an attack killing X percent of America's population."

That description makes it easy to see how the factoids above were derived. The Times writers took the number of Iraqis who have died violently since the American invasion (50,000) and divided it by the population of Iraq (about 26 million) to find that 0.19 percent of Iraqis have been killed since 2003. The equivalent percentage of the American population, then, is 570,000. Gingrich's calculation works the same way. There are 6.3 million Israelis. Gingrich worked out that one in 787,500, or 0.00013 percent of Israel's population, was killed in the Hezbollah rocket attack. Multiply that proportion by the population of the United States, and you get something close to the quoted figure. (The correct number is closer to 380 Americans than 500, but Newt was in the ballpark.)

...

The next paragraphs discusses whether such numbers mean anything much, why and when they might. Alas, they make no such calculation for the number of Lebanese killed versus their population translated into relative numbers of our own.

I can understand, if not why, at least that it's very much true that Republicans for the most part (and completely among their leaders), simply don't care what happens to the people in the Arab countries. Especially if it's at the hands of a justly enraged Israel. I don't understand the passivity of the Democratic leaders; but that's true about them across a wide range of issues--as they continue to cower in their corners, only coming out to complain (attempting to make political capital whenever an issue seems favorable). As for the people who actually make the decisions and/or influence them... Bush/Cheney and perhaps Rice, they live in their own little workd, quite happily divorced from reality. Bush and Rice appear totally ignorant on the topic and determined to remain so. They apparently think, "well, things haven't been working over there... since... ever, so maybe if we let Israel crush it's neighbors, things will quiet down for a while". Civilian deaths don't matter--indeed, they probably suspect that there is no such thing as an "innocent" civilian over there--somehow they're all complicit in the terra-ist movements.

We all know who the world's greatest terrorist turns out to be.

[MamaBear]

14. I don't have to imagine

I live in New York. Ditto the folks in the Gulf Coast.

*Co. brings death and destruction deliberately, enables it, encourages it, revels in it, ingores it -- depending on what's most convenient and what they think will make for the best photo op.

Are we so numb that we've lost track of the losses we've sustained at home, not to mention those we've sustained overseas, since this administration grabbed power?

Just sayin'

[hfojvt]

25. none of us do

about 2400 Americans have died in car accidents in the last 12 days with a larger number being severely injured. 1.8 million Americans have died of heart disease in the last 3 years. 150,000 have died in car accidents, 60,000 in homicides. There have been 18 million violent crimes in the last 3 years. 40,000 have died of AIDS. There have been 80,000 suicides.

My estimates may be a little off, since I am going from memory, but that's the general idea.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

15. What color are they?

Are they poor? Are they from MY neighborhood?

In my experience there are far too many people in America who would turn a blind eye so long as it wasn't them or their own family members.

[anewdeal]

17. Imagine rockets being fired into Canada

and the government not stopping it. Then I could imagine 380 dead Americans.

[BurtWorm]

19. You imagine the Canadians would respond like Israelis?

You have a very good imagination. ;)

[anewdeal]

21. Canada would try to defend her people.

The USA is much more advanced militarily, so it would be quite difficult, but Canada would still try.

[BurtWorm]

23. Your analogy is so incredibly lame, it's hard to see the point

you're trying to make.

[anewdeal]

30. your words are hurtful, but I still believe that Canada would try

[BurtWorm]

31. I'm honestly sorry to hurt your feelings, but I don't really see

where you're going with this. Are you trying to say Canada would have a right to kill 380 American civilians if it were trying to kill those responsible for sending the bombs across the border? You would have no problem with that number of American by-standers being sacrificed for the sake of Canada's security?

[anewdeal]

34. No one has a right to kill

But every country has a duty to protect her citizens. Every country has a duty to control it's borders, and since Lebanon is unable to do so, Israel must take it upon herself to ensure that what happens inside Lebanon's borders is not harmful to Israelis.

[Xenotime]

18. I saw 3000+ American civilians die in one day

[BurtWorm]

20. That went over well with the public.

Do you think 380 dead from airstrikes over 12 days would go over better?

[Xenotime]

22. This is just a street fight compared to what the * is used to.

[Clarkie1]

24. Imagine radical "La Raza" extremists firing rockets into the American SW..

and kidnapping and killing U.S. border patrol agents in order to negotiate for more favorable immigration laws. Imagine the Mexican army was too weak to do anything about it. Imagine a few of the rockets hit an elementary school that was in session in San Diego, and another hit a nursing home in L.A. Suppose the extremists stored their weapons caches in civilian neighborhoods along the U.S./Mexican border, and fired their rockets from the neighborhoods...just imagine.

:sarcasm:

[BurtWorm]

26. Imagine 380 Mexican civilians killed and 1000 wounded in a US response.

No sarcasm. Would that be an acceptable number of Mexicans to kill to get the "La Raza" extremists to stop lobbing bombs at the US?

[Clarkie1]

28. No avoidable loss of innocent life is acceptable.

But we would of course do whatever we had to do to neutralize the extremists...if they are in civilian neighborhoods, there would likely be civilian casualties, perhaps many. And, it would be unavoidable.

[BurtWorm]

29. The US would not dare drop bombs indiscriminately on a civilian

neighborhood, even in Mexico, unless it did an elaborate dance beforehand similar to what it did in Iraq. Honestly, Israel is about the only country in the world that has the chutzpah, for lack of a better word, to flatten the neighborhood of a country it's not at war with to hit a militia group it wants eliminated.

Essentially you're saying you wouldn't really care all that much if the Mexican civilians died as long as "extremists" were the actual target of the raids?

[Clarkie1]

32. Nobody is dropping bombs "indiscriminately." eom

[BurtWorm]

33. So they've discriminately killed 380 Lebanese civilians?

That's what it looks like, certainly.

[Lilith Velkor]

27. I'd call that a lull in the Drug War

[Pavulon]

35. about 3 days worth of traffic deaths

it is an open war. All simple analogies fail.