Please provide links to statements Bush has made that "we are good, and they are evil. We are innocent, and they are guilty," and that Muslims as a whole are in the wrong. I don't think you will find them. What you will find are statements Bush has made that Islam is a religion of peace and the fanatics we are fighting are not representative of all Muslims.
I don't know of anyone here who is advocating the extermination of all Muslims. If you could provide a link, that would be great. I do know a lot of people who are advocating the elimination of that small group of extremist terrorists who have declared that they are dedicated to the destruction of the Western way of life and a return to a worldwide Islamic state. With regard to the second para, that sounds pretty good; there is just one problem. Did we not read the other day that a Muslim community recently beheaded a young girl because she was too flirtatious? Hmmm....I'll have to check the archives to see if that has happened recently in the West. Now let's see... how does that impact upon this discussion? The moral relativists will say 'not at all'.
Etgar Keret Bio Blog Index RSS 08.04.2006 Q.E.D.: Israel, Lebanon, And The Metrics Of War (24 comments ) READ MORE: Indictments, Israel, Lebanon A friend of my brother's told me a story a few years ago. He was taking part in a demonstration against the security fence when a group of settlers showed up. The loudest among them were several American Jews, who hurled insults and physical threats at the Left wing demonstrators. The demonstrators, for their part, tried to exercise restraint, but not all of them succeeded. Some of them--notably, a contingent of American Jews for peace--found it difficult to control themselves and hurled violent curses back at the settlers. Very quickly, the war of words had deteriorated from broken Hebrew to juicy New York slang, and a few minutes later, to fists. For a moment, my brother's friend told me, both the peace activists and the settlers froze, staring at the impassioned group of Zionist and anti-Zionist Americans raining blows on each other. "I don't understand why they had to come all the way here," one of the Palestinians said to my brother's friend. "They could have beat each other up in Brooklyn and saved the price of a plane ticket." Recently I was reminded of this story when I came across two articles written by Americans about the Israel-Hezbollah war. One is "Arithmetic of Pain," by Alan Dershowitz, in the Jewish World Review; the other, "And Then They Paid Dearly," from the blog written for the Huffington Post by Tom McCarthy in Beirut. Although these articles approach the conflict from opposite ends of the spectrum, it seems to me, they approach it with a similarly passionate self-assurance. Dershowitz is well known. So, perhaps, are his views on the conflict. Dershowitz likes to compare Hezbollah to a bank robber, the Lebanese to hostages and the IDF to cops--good guys who stay good guys even if they'll shoot five hundred hostages dead. If the argument is familiar, so are the objections . They may be too obvious to rehash here. But I was surprised to find equally blind fervor on the on the other side of the debate. McCarthy cites the numbers of casualties as if they contained--in a self-explanatory way--their own indictment of the Israeli air strikes. According to McCarthy, the ratio of Lebanese civilian casualties to Israeli civilian casualties on a given day (fifty to two). says something fundamental and inarguable about the morality of the war. But what exactly does it say? That on that day, Israel was twenty-five times more evil than the Hezbollah? If Israel had settled on killing two civilians that day--two babies for example, deliberately destroyed by an Apache at close range--would the Israeli government be blameless because it maintained the principle of proportionality? Should we weigh it in the balance that Hezbollah operates consistently out of densely-populated neighborhoods? Does this change the calculus of blame? Should we consider the possibility that the large number of attacks and Lebanese casualties on that day may in fact have disrupted Hezbollah's own attacks, thus reducing the number of Israeli casualties? If Hezbollah had managed to kill more Israelis that day, would it have somehow made the killing of fifty Lebanese civilians more justified? Finally, is the fact that the Hezbollah killed so many fewer Israelis that day an indication of moral scruples, or does it simply mean that they tried to kill hundreds and failed? I don't raise all these questions in order to absolve Israel from the responsibility of needlessly killing Lebanese civilians (the Dershowitz view). Nor am I writing here in order to deny speakers like Dershowitz and McCarthy the right to fight it out ideologically in Brooklyn, Beirut or on the Happy Hunting Grounds of the Internet. And I'm not saying we don't have boundless cruelty here, or that we don't sacrifice innocent lives on the altar of national honor and other, equally hazy ideals on a daily basis. I simply wish they would try to understand that the tragedy of the Middle East cannot be ended with a calculator and a highly developed moral sense. â Translated from the original Hebrew http://www.huffingtonpost.com/etgar-keret/qed-israel-lebanon-_b_26497.html
You are very wrong my friend. It's not Lebanon that issues UN resolutions. It's the UN. Thus it's THE REST OF THE WORLD that object to the unfulfilled resolutions by Israel. You're bringing up the case of Lebanon, but we all know that Lebanon is just a proxy territory for Syria and then Iran. So discussing Lebanon is not really interesting in my opinion. Talk about legitimate military is just double standards. Guerilla warfare is what you sink down to when operating a "legitimate" army isn't an option anymore. Your thinking is 20th century. Armies doesn't represent states anymore, they represent movements and regimes. How much resources hasn't the CIA spent training the Mujahedeen and other "freedom fighters" in the last 50 years? The naming only stems from whether you agree with their ideas or not.
I readily admit I fully agree with Pabst here. Neither a Jew nor Muslim, and my Christianity is way more secular than any American would like to include I imagine.
âIf you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity,â he said on Lebanese television. âWe will bomb Tel Aviv.â But he also offered to halt Hezbollahâs missile barrage into Israel if it stopped bombing Lebanon. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/world/middleeast/04mideast.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin This is from the Hezbollah leader either today or yesterday (NYT). There is one thing that is slowly starting to bug me. Hezbollah says it is dedicated to wiping Israel off the map, and murdering all Israeli citizens. Okay, fine. Now, hundreds of Lebanese have been killed by Israeli counter-attacks. So the result is... Hezbollah threatens that if you bomb Beirut.... that is, IF, they will send rockets into Tel Aviv. But Israel have been bombing Beirut the whole time. Now, my question is this. Why on earth would they be holding back at this point? If they had the ability to lauch rockets into the heart of Tel Aviv (as I am assuming they do, although I may be wrong... RM??) then why wouldn't they have done so already? It seems a bit weird to me that they would be shaking their fist and saying 'Just ONE MORE... you just hit me ONE MORE TIME and I will punch you back'. This while blood streams from their lips and nose and teeth.
i think it is possible iran has the last world for what concerns targetin' telaviv since its thier missiles and their equipement.