Awful

Israeli attack on Lebanon not about captured soldiers and rockets

President Bush speaking in Miami yesterday said it's ``awful'' that civilians have to die during Israel's noble effort to clean up their bad ``neighbor'' where ``tyranny and terror to thrive''. He even uses the time-tested rhetorical construction of invoking the events of September 11, 2001 so the public gets a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down:

And as we saw on Sept. 11, the status quo in the Middle East led to death and destruction in the United States, and it had to change.

Awful? Sure. But we expect this from Bush. So let's talk about something truly awful--the pro-Israel stance of supposed guardians of the left. Don't get me started on the insufferable Al Franken. I'll just quote a column by the Canadian-born intellectual and humanist historian Gwynne Dyer that appeared in today's Bangor Daily News:

The kill ratio is becoming a problem: Israel has been killing about 40 Lebanese civilians for every Israeli civilian who is killed. They are all killed by accident, of course, but such a long chain of accidents begins to look like carelessness, and even in Israel and the United States many people are getting uneasy about the slaughter.

This interpretation of events is incredible. What? It's getting harder to see that a very small military skirmish and two soldiers captured for trade for numerous Lebanese the Israelis have rounded up over the years justifies a ``40:1 kill ratio'' and devastation of an entire population? Maybe these liberals should start asking if it's pre-planned ethnic cleansing and genocide that's going on.

Israel has declared everyone in its free-fire zone ``terrorist''. That hardly squares with calling the slaughter accidental.