Posted on 02/21/2007 8:59:05 PM PST by dervish
The French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen provoked outrage among British veterans yesterday when he compared the September 11 attacks on the United States to RAF-led bombing raids during the Second World War.
The National Front leader said both were "terrorist acts as they expressly targeted civilians to force military leaders to capitulate". Mr Le Pen, 79, also dismissed the al-Qa'eda atrocities in 2001 as a mere "incident".
He told the Roman Catholic newspaper La Croix: "Three thousand dead — that is how many die in Iraq in a month and it's far less than the deaths in the Marseille or Dresden bombings at the end of the Second World War."
Praising those Muslims who condemned the attacks on New York and Washington, Mr Le Pen said: "The September 11 event, or one could say incident, prompted a certain number of people to distance themselves [from Islamic extremism] to avoid falling under the barrage of accusations that was unleashed."
'snip'
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Why is he still alive? Surely there is one Jew with a 9mm over there.
He got a fair amount of the Jewish vote for speaking out against Muslim Immigrants to France.
...so much propaganda from so many neo-neo-Nazis these days. The bombing in Dresden was for the purpose of destroying quite a few military production and transportation facilities. The place was also a tinderbox.
Guess he misses the days when he used to speak German.
Sounds like a French Murtha. Senile dementia.
Yup. LePen is just pisszed that the Nazis lost the big one. Nice middle name, too -- real macho, "Marie"...
As time goes by, I`ve come to realize we really did the Germans a big favor when we kicked them out of France
Very well said, and very tragic.
. . . so much propaganda from so many neo-neo-Nazis these days - like Winston Churchill?
"Churchill, who approved of the targeting of Dresden and supported the bombing prior to the event, distanced himself from it. On March 28, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff he wrote:
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."
If people claim that the terror bombings of German civilians was a legitimate tactic in Dresden, then Al Queda's justification of 9/11 would be that terror bombing civilians in the World Trade Center is also a legitimate tactic. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so to speak.
This is why sensible people do not attempt to justify terror bombings (like Dresden) aimed at civilians - the next bombing may be in a city near you.
They still have to live next door to them. I guess we did what we could do.
You're saying there is a moral equivalence between Britain, which had been relentlessly attacked with bombing raids on civilian London, bombing Dresden and Al Queada, a terrorist group that had previously attacked numerous civilian targets and suffered almost no retaliation to date, flying planes into the WTC towers and the Pentagon, again killing mostly civilians?
Dresden was simply one in a long series of Allied and German bombings of cities. The destruction of Hamburg a couple of years earlier was at least as bad, and Germany was still attacking London with V2's at that time. The only reason Dresden gets all the publicity is that the end of the war was near. But to compare Dresden to September 11, well, that's simply foolish. A better comparison is to compare September 11 to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack on the WTC wasn't part of a long series of similar "events." It stands alone, a single, solitary surprise attack on perfect innocents. There was no surprise at all about the Dresden bombing, and no innocence in a campaign that was over five years old at that point.
If you start terror bombing civilians, then you shouldn't be surprised if your opponent retaliates. Some may be surprised to learn that the British, not the Germans, started terror bombing civilians deliberately. The RAF Air Secretary admitted it in his book.
From: Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Paperback)
by Frederick J. Veale (Author) on Amazon.com
". . . The accusation leveled against the Germans that they deliberately caused harm to civilians is refuted by the fact that the British started this breach of international law. Veale cites J.M. Spaight's book BOMBING VINDICATED to prove that the British started the deliberate bombing of German civilians on May 11, 1940 which Spaight called the "Splendid Decision." While the battle for France was being waged hundreds of miles from German civilians, the British, who should have focused their bombing to military targets such as bridge networks in France, instead bombed innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the Battle of France. In fact, Veale makes a good point that had the British concentrated their bombing on these bridge networks, destruction of these networks would have stopped Hitler's mechanized forces due to the lack of getting gasoline supplies. The German offensive would have stalled and would have been defeated."
Right there your premise falls apart. We did not start bombing innocent civilians leading to the attacks on 9/11. Your moral equivalence is empty.
This is another reason we hate frogs: Even the conservatives are total a**holes.
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