The Rhetoric Of Infanticide

Posted by on . 4 comments.

Reuters brings us Israel’s official position on the killing of children in the Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon conflict:

Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman said Qana was “a hub for Hizbollah” and said his country had “beseeched” residents to leave prior to Sunday’s attack.
[...]
“Every dead Lebanese child is a horrible mistake and a tragedy. For them (Hizbollah) every dead Israeli child is a victory and a cause for celebration.”

Striking, isn’t it, how Israel makes so many more horribly tragic mistakes than Hezbollah holds wild victory celebrations?

Really puzzling too, given that Israel has the benefit of arguably the best intelligence service in the world and the most sophisiticated munitions, including precision-guided bombs and state-of-the-art aircraft, whereas Hezbollah is blindly firing unsophisticated rockets that don’t even seem to qualify to be called missiles.

I haven’t seen an official count of children killed on both sides, but I am willing to bet that the ratio of child deaths is even more lopsided than the roughly ten-is-to-one ratio of overall deaths.*

Funny, isn’t it, how we as a nation can get so exercised over children working in sweatshops, and yet exhibit so little outrage over the indiscriminate killings of children by Israel in what they are pleased to describe as this carefully targeted self-defense exercise.

* According to Reuters, “At least 523 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 51 Israelis have died in the fighting that began on July 12 after Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.” This is after undercounting the Lebanese deaths in the Qana attacks today.

Comments

  1. Ross Petersen says:
    July 30, 2006 at 11:46 pm

    It seems to me that in the case of a hezbollah rocket that lands in Israel, the people in Israel are generally scattered all over the place and therefore there are likely to be fewer civilian deaths per launch of one of those rockets than say the situation where a precision guided bomb launched from a plane against a particular target because the hezbollah troops are deliberately locating themselves in very close proximity to where Lebanese civilians are. Now one of those precision guided bombs may well hit the intended target very accurately, but given the explosive power of those bombs it is inevitable that there will be civilian deaths.

    So what is Israel to do?

    Not use planes and send in very strong gound forces in much larger numbers than they have done so far? There will still be large numbers of civilian deaths in that scenario.

    Do nothing at all? Well, they could hope for a diplomatic solution but given the anti Israel attitudes prevalent in the UN & EU, that would be a sheer waste of time at best.

  2. sarabeth says:
    July 31, 2006 at 4:16 am

    May I recommend The “hiding among civilians” myth? The synopsis reads:

    Israel claims it’s justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn’t trust its civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.

    And your defense of Israel really doesn’t address the issue of child deaths, does it, which was the point of my post. I guess there are no standard talking points for that yet.

  3. sac says:
    July 31, 2006 at 8:31 am

    Then where are they?

  4. sarabeth says:
    August 2, 2006 at 4:17 pm

    Reuters is reporting that Human Rights Watch has revised the estimate of the Qana toll downwards:

    The U.S.-based rights watchdog Human Rights Watch on Wednesday put the death toll from an Israeli air strike at the Lebanese village of Qana at 28 and 13 missing, below the official Lebanese figure of 54 dead.
    [...]
    Of the 28 dead, 16 were children, Human Rights Watch said.