Hiding War Crimes Behind a Question [View all]

[stupidicus]

Like with all conflicts, it seems to me that a satisfactory resolution to it can only come from a fact-based and just assignment and apportionment of blame accepted and acknowledged by the parties involved, which in turn leads to acceptable and agreed upon solutions.

The impediments to this are many in this case, but few stick out like the proverbial sore thumb like this one imo.

Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself? Though it is hard for a question to be wrong, this is a dead wrong question even though it is the heart and soul of Israel’s defense of its attack on little Gaza.

It is also the basis of the U.S. assessment of the ongoing moral disaster. The Senate voted unanimously to answer the question in the affirmative while ignoring all other piercingly relevant circumstances. Never has a misplaced question had such prestige and high-level cachet.

Israeli Prime Minister and U.S. President Barack Obama during an Oval Office meeting on May 18, 2009. (Photo credit: White House)
The contorted question sins by deviousness and legerdemain. With verbal wizardry, offense suddenly becomes defense with all the legitimacy that defense imports. It is akin to asking “Does a rapist during a rape have a right to defend himself if the victim resists?”

With collective amnesia, Israel and the United States brush aside basic realities of warfare. Siege (or blockade) is an act of offensive warfare. Indeed it is among the most devastating of weapons, condemned by both “Just War” theory and — very much to the point — by Jewish and Christian ethics of war. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/07/24/hiding-war-crimes-behind-a-question/

The question and the answer many an individual come up with lead to many a blind spot, like a disregard for such fixtures in international law and laws of war like proportionality, collective punishment, etc. These things are imo, a direct consequence of those individuals casting both parties under the same moral equivalence umbrella in an effort to justify the far more damaging actions/war crimes of Israel http://prospect.org/article/moral-responsibility-and-israel-palestinian-conflict without any consideration whatsoever to the actual damage respectively suffered, like it's really nothing to consider.

I also read and hear time and again about how it is that Hamas -- a Frankenstein Monster not unlike AQ or SH in terms of construction and motive for it http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2002/06/18/Analysis-Hamas-history-tied-to-Israel/UPI-82721024445587/ -- intends to not be satisfied until every jew on the planet is killed. That reads eaxctly like the rational our current pres and crew have used to justify the extra-judicial killing of American citizens. "Intends" is morphed into the definitional equivalent of "imminent/immediate" justifying both the means and end of their removal -- the constitution in that case be damned. Israel appears to be using the same rationale the 9/11 criminals used to justify their punishment of innocents -- criminalization of us all, and this conflict provided a good measure of that criminality in their minds.

There's also that old "Well, they shouldn't have elected Hamas as their reps" line, which in my mind is not unlike the justification I use to read and hear from rightwingnuts regarding Bush's collective punishment of the Iraqis -- "Well, if they didn't want what they got, they shoulda deposed him".

And just to be clear here, I'm a "just war" proponent, always have been and always will be, so I'm not trying to justify the war crimes, etc, that Palestinians or their leadership are guilty of in the course of explaining things. I do however have no difficulty whatsoever assigning and apportioning most of the blame for current conditions on the Israelis. In the final analysis, what we have here is a case of one party taking, the other wanting to take back, and there's no mystery as to who is who, no, and who the resolution to the conflict should favor in terms of turning back the clock?

The question for the American people is, how high a price are we willing to pay for the same guilt by association we shamelessly continue? They, like us, continue to be #1 at all the wrong things http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/study-israel-leads-in-ignoring-security-council-resolutions-1.31971 so I can't help but wonder based upon what they lay claim to having the "moral authority" in the matter other than in "never again" lessons they have long been on the dispensing end of in this instance, while harboring a wholly unreasonable expectation that their victims go quietly into night so that they can live rightly without fear of reprisals from the parties they willfully, disproportionally, and excessively harm because they can as the far superior force.

Just because the spoils go to the victors doesn't make the right of might, right.