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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

"PROPORTIONALITY" IN WAR AND PEACE

Time and time again Israel is accused of the use of disproportionate violence. Reality and perception are not always the same thing. The BBC and SKY Communications have been accused recently of what might be called the "disproportionate use of objectivity" in reporting. Here too there is a non-trivial distinction to be made between reality and perception.

As a consequence of the recent warfare between Israel and Gaza, approximately one Arab of Gaza is dead for every ten Qassam rockets that these same Gazan Arabs launched into Israel provoking Israel's response. A third of the dead Gazan Arabs may be civillian dead, undesired yet inevitable collateral damage of war. Many of these dead civilillians voted for Hamas, and therefore cannot be said to be innocents, as the overt platform of Hamas calls for the annihilation of Israel.

One must ask: "When your next door neighbor is hell bent on waging war against you to the point of your annihilation, and terrorizes you daily towards that end, is there such an applicable concept as 'proportionate' force?"

One must ask as well: "At what point is the world itself culpable, when it lends it's hand, it's heart, it's mind, and it's resources to the reconstruction and 'humanitarian' aid, re-vitalization and re-arming that evil neighbor, therefore DE FACTO and even DE JURE showing favor to your terrorist neighbor, that same neighbor who denies your humanity and your existential right to a peaceful co-existence?"

If anything is to be said about the BBC and world media coverage of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, it is that the plaints of the Arabs have been disproportionately elevated and extolled to the level of a worldwide propaganda campaign against Israel. Only recently has the media even begun to publish occasional stories both recent and historical that pierce the ballooning of worldwide anti-Israel propaganda. We only begin to hear in the media about the mass expulsions of Jews from Muslim nations post-WW2. We only begin to hear about the Arab-Hitler alliances of WW2 that included the Arabs of Palestine, who continued Hitler's war against the Jews by seeking to destroy Israel both before and after it's legal existence. Holocaust denial is now a weekly scandal in the news, most recently given attention by the Pope's decision this past week to revoke the excommunications of certain priests, one of whom is a blatant Holocaust denier. And where Holocaust deniers have been screaming that six-million Jews were not murdered by the Nazis, in the past year mass graves of Jews in areas such as the Ukraine have been uncovered; it is estimated that perhaps an additional 1.5-million Jewish souls must be added to the six-million already accounted for.

Are the BBC and SKY being disproportionately objective in choosing not to air the Appeal for humanitarian aid for the Arabs of Gaza, when both BBC and SKY have determined that that Appeal is biased against Israel? Probably not...