Sharon serves notice: Two can play at terror

On the night of July 23 an Israeli F-16 fighter fired a one-ton missile into a residential building in Gaza, killing top Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, 40, along with 14 Palestinians, including nine children. Before discussing the event, it's useful to note something about civilian casualties in general.

Irregular combatants often use human shields. Setting up shop in the middle of villages and refugee camps offers two advantages to a terrorist. First, it provides him with safe areas as regular forces may be reluctant to inflict civilian casualties. Second, should civilian casualties occur, the militant can use them in his public relations war. Never mind that using human shields confers no immunity against military operations, according to the Geneva conventions. Holding up the corpse of a baby for the TV cameras, as Palestinians did after the Gaza attack, is a coup that can turn a military defeat into a propaganda victory.

In war, civilian casualties occur for three reasons. The first is plain error. When people fling about explosives, accidents happen. NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Yugoslav conflict is an obvious example. The second is what the military call "collateral damage," in which the deliberate destruction of a military target -- a bridge, a missile silo, a terrorist -- results in incidental death or injury to civilian bystanders. Finally, there's the direct targeting of civilian structures and populations, such as the Nazi bombing of Rotterdam during the Second World War or the Allied bombing of Dresden. This last type is sometimes called "terror-bombing." It's viewed as an atrocity because it targets non-combatants or civilian structures with no military significance.

The distinction is shaky, though. It would be difficult to argue that destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which brought about the capitulation of Japan, had "no military significance." The sad truth is that terror can have a great deal of military significance. It's terror that has kept the Arab/Muslim side in the game in the Middle East conflict.

One doesn't need to deny military significance to terror in order to condemn it. The problem with blowing the legs off grandmothers on a bus, or teens in a disco, or toddlers in their cribs, isn't that it's militarily insignificant, but that it's wrong.

Apologists of Israel's action offer various justifications. Margot Dudkevitch in The Jerusalem Post describes Shehadeh as a "time bomb," which he clearly was. She points out that Shehadeh was planning to blow up the recently constructed Gush Katif bridge and massacre hundreds. John Podhoretz notes in the New York Post that Israel's attack didn't contravene the Geneva conventions and that the responsibility for human shields lies with the parties using them.

True as such justifications are, they don't answer (or even ask) why Shehadeh needed to be killed with a missile fired into a crowded tenement. David Warren does address the question in the Ottawa Citizen, and offers the answer that all alternatives would have resulted in more bloodshed. He writes that "the method chosen was the most economical of human life." This is certainly true of Israeli lives, especially when one considers (as Daniel Pipes pointed out in a recent television interview) that booby traps killed 13 Israeli soldiers recently when they tried to arrest terrorists. Saving Israeli lives is a legitimate consideration for an Israeli prime minister, but it doesn't dispose of the moral dilemma of blowing up sleeping children.

Ralph Peters, writing in The Wall Street Journal, sees no moral dilemma. War is war. "The world must learn," he writes, "that, when civilians allow terrorists to use them, the civilians become legitimate military targets." Sounds like Hamas, talking of Israeli civilians.

Friendly critics of Israel take a different tack. They make no attempt to justify blowing up children, but insist that it wasn't intentional. "Something went terribly wrong with this mission," wrote Clifford Orwin last week in the National Post.

"The Prime Minister of Israel did not want to commit a terrorist act," offered Ari Shavit in the Israeli newspaper Ha'Aretz. "He did not want to kill Lilah Hamis Shehadeh (41), Iman Shehadeh (14), Mohammed Ashwa (40), Ahmed Ashwa (3), Mona Fahmi Hwaiti (22), Subhi Hwaiti (4.5), Mohammed Hwaiti (3), Iman Hassan Matar (27), Ala Matar (11), Diana Matar (5), Mohammed Matar (4), Iman Matar (18 months) and Dina Raid Matar (2 months). He only wanted to kill Salah Shehadeh, an arch-murderer. However, when Ariel Sharon decided that the goal of killing Shehadeh justified the means of dropping a one-ton bomb on a residential neighbourhood, he turned the targeted and justified killing of Shehadeh into a grave and unforgivable act."

I think the reality is harsher. There's a presumption in law which holds that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts. When Israel's military fired a one-ton missile into a crowded tenement building it was impossible for it not to know that civilians would die. These being natural consequences, it follows the authorities must have intended them.

Chances are nothing "went wrong" with this mission: It went exactly as planned. Israel's leaders got tired of having shoppers, commuters and wedding guests massacred in gruesome, ritual bombings, and decided to respond in kind. July 23 was addressed to what Israelis call the Mechablim, the destroyers, the terrorists. The target was their families. Shehadeh himself was collateral damage.

Mr. Sharon is serving notice on Israel's enemies that terrorism is a game at which two can play, while maintaining the fiction that he wouldn't have bombed Shehadeh if he had known Hamas's terror chief was shielded by his children. Why the charade? Perhaps because Israelis are still insufficiently comfortable with evil, unlike their opponents.

Israel's leaders have come a long way from David Ben-Gurion's 1928 remark that "our sense of morality forbids us to harm a single hair on the head of an Arab child, even though by this we might attain all that we seek." The gradual departure from this lofty stand wasn't Israel's choice. The Jewish state has been pushed and provoked for 54 years by Arab/Muslim rejectionists and their terrorist supporters. It explains the Sharon-government's current position. Whether it excuses it is a different question.

He writes that "the method chosen was the most economical of human life." This is certainly true of Israeli lives...

This is where the writer stumbles in logic. The quote was "HUMAN LIVES". It does not break lives into Arab vs Israeli Lives, for in the eyes of the Jew who said it, a life is a life and is of equal value. The Jewish person quoted did not think of it as which life is more valuable for an Arab life is of equal value to a Jewish life to him. It was the AUTHOR of this article that split the distinction into some form of foot ball game where lives on the enemy team have less value than the lives on the home team.

Face it, killing this murderer was tried many times and finaly it worked. A little too good. GET OVER IT ALREADY!

One has to wonder why liberals work so dang hard to find something to justify their hatred of Jews. They will over look the hundreds of bodys from this mass murderer for a couple of years without a single peep, but then they spend a week discussing the mistake of a military operation done by the Israeli's to take him out that accidently killed a handful!

It is if in their hearts they know they hate Jews, but are just trying to figure out why.

Denying that there is a God and thereby choosing the way of evil, they wonder why their heart is so dark, and why they hate Christians and Jews, God's people.

You know, given a choice between Good or evil, they deny good, and therefor default to evil. There is no third choice, no middle ground between good or evil, It is a multiple choice question with A or B but no C (none of the above).

"...or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" -- Matthew 16: 26

"But is it really possible to believe in the devil, without believing in God?" -- Feodor Dostoevsky

Would it be worth spending an eternity in hell to prevent the Holocaust or September 11? Someone should have asked Curtis Le May. He killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to save millions of Japanese civilians and a hundred thousand American soldiers into the bargain. His soul in exchange for victory.

Someone should have asked Robert Strange McNamara, for whom sending a message to Hanoi was a sufficient exchange. Someone should have asked a man I once knew, who killed an enemy informer in his own home, with the man's wife and children begging that their father be spared.

In combat, there is always more than your life at stake. The best always know that killing was never ever good; only sometimes necessary. It is a crazy situation; and we strike a crazy balance between keeping our lives and living with our selves. We know, in the end, that the quality of our acts may lie not in themselves, but in what we have not intended, or in what we hoped to do.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps not in the least because we are persuaded that there must be a God to forgive us our sins.

And it is sad that tiny kids have to die. It's sad that so-called parents will raise tiny kids to hate and strap toy bombs to their tiny kids. However, if the Israelis continue to leave a smoldering hole where a terrorist leader used to exist, maybe such people will figure out it's not a good idea to associate with terrorist leaders. And maybe if they can't get paid 25 Grand to sacrifice their kids, that will be discouraging too. Darn that.

"The sad truth is that terror can have a great deal of military significance. It's terror that has kept the Arab/Muslim side in the game.
And it is sad that tiny kids have to die. It's sad that so-called parents will raise tiny kids to hate and strap toy bombs to their tiny kids. And maybe if they can't get paid 25 Grand to sacrifice their kids, that will be discouraging too."..............

Let's see if I got this right. The Arabs raise children to become bombers and martyrs. The families of the bombers are given a $25K reward and taken care of for their dead hero.
If I am right so far where the Arabs are able to recruit those Bozos to blow up civilians, then what would happen if the Isralies target the families of the "hero"?
perhaps they could also target the village or camp that bred the bomber as well. I know two wrongs don't make a right, but it sure would put a damper on the Arab recruitment process if they know that instead of getting a reward they would bring retribution on their family.
The martyr title would be a little less revered if the population realized what would happen in return.

Zech 14:20-21
20 In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD; and the pots in the LORD's house shall be like the bowls before the altar.
21 Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the LORD of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them, and seethe therein: and in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the LORD of hosts.

Boy, those kids are lucky, they get to have their 72 virgins and don't even have to go through the trouble of dating.

If the people who are cheering the massacre bombings get more personally involved themselves, like happened here, pehaps they wont be so ready to cheer the massacre bombings when there is a price to pay, and not just free entertainment.

Sometimes I think that the only real solution is the Carthage solution.

The martyr title would be a little less revered if the population realized what would happen in return.

That seems about right to me. Human Psychology 098. No return on investment. Hey, you can gather in the town square all you want, shake your fist and shout "Death to the West!" and brainwash your kids all you want to hate the West as the cause of all your problems, but, darn, if someone keeps flying a 2000-pound bomb dead-center into your various terrorist lairs, darn it, but that photo-op is going to seem less and less important over time.

If ya wanna act like an animal, get treated like an animal. And don't act shocked when it happens, even if Kofi Annan pretends he's shocked.

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