Little Green Footballs

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Israel shrugs

Golda Meir once said.

“We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”
I think it's about time the Israelis started loving and respecting the lives of Arab children more than they hate their fathers and mothers. If they are serious about peace that is.
At least 40 Lebanese civilians were killed, 23 of them children, in an Israel Air Force strike on a building in the south Lebanon village of Qana on Sunday. Dozens of others were reportedly trapped in the rubble.

Several houses collapsed and a three-story building where about 100 civilians were sheltering was destroyed, witnesses and rescue workers said.

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed that the IAF hit at least ten targets in the Qana. According to the army, the sites targeted were houses occupied by Hezbollah cells that launched Katyusha rockets into Israel in recent days.

The IDF said it had warned residents of Qana to leave and said Hezbollah bore responsibility for using it to fire rockets at Israel.
Let's just recap there. The IDF is admitting that it 'slaughtered*' 40 Lebanese civilians, 23 of them children and the best it can come up with is "We warned 'em, it's Hezbollah's fault!" This following quote sums it up.
The Israeli leadership elite is starting to sound like the semen-crusted violence addicts at Little Green Footballs.
Source: Ha'aretz & Whiskey Bar

UPDATE: There are now even more dead.
More than 54 civilians, at least 34 of them children, have been killed in a town in south Lebanon in the deadliest Israeli strike of the conflict so far.
*Edit due to comments.

5 comments:

enthymeme said...

Silly post. "Murder" in all common law jurisdictions requires proof of mens rea - intent being one element of a 2 limb test (the other being the act itself). Collateral damage as a result of blasting a Hezbollah rocket launch site does not fulfill that requirement. You mischaracterise events both in fact and law, flagrantly.

X said...

Would your legal sensibilities be happier with the term 'manslaughter' then?

X said...

Or is it 'reckless driving'? Perhaps it's 'missile use under the influence [of blinding hatred of Arabs]'?

unaha-closp said...

I think it's about time the Israelis started loving and respecting the lives of Arab children more than they hate their fathers and mothers. If they are serious about peace that is.

What steps that Israel has not previously taken, would you recommend?

Richard said...

I'd call it murder & wouldn't have changed the wording. First, the IDF admitted the house had not been a source for rocket firing. It was bombed anyway. Second, a Qana resident said drones flew overhead all day long before the bombing & could see clearly all 40 children playing outside in the building's courtyard. Does the IAF not have reconnaissance?

If they didn't know there were civilians in there they should have. It's not first degree murder, but it's murder nonetheless.

Besides let's not get bogged down in semantics. Whatever you call it it was Israel's worst blunder of the war and hopefully the latter's undoing.