Friday, September 28, 2007
Melanie Phillips does Stalin: Two kidnappings are a tragedy, 600 deaths are just a statistic...
...pity she can't get that statistic right. While we are on the subject of the deluded [see below], Melanie Phillips persists with her fictions about every corner of the Middle East. She is at her most offensive when she is talking about the victims of IDF atrocities, and last year's Lebanese war generated a number of those.
Phillips directs her scorn at Robert Harris, who commented on Blair's pathetic inaction in the summer war. Here is the full quote from the Guardian, with my clarifications in brackets:
"Coming on top of the crazy decision to attack Iraq, it [the aforementioned pathetic inaction] just seemed the ultimate example of a complete collapse of independent British foreign policy. Because the Americans wouldn't condemn Israel, we couldn't say anything either - and yet even a lot of Israelis recognised that it was a massive loss of civilian life, equivalent to the British bombing Dublin to deal with terrorism in Ulster. Without getting into the whole detail of the issue, we should at least have been a bit more even-handed about the whole thing. And I think that that did Blair terrible damage. At that point I think he was doomed, really."
Phillips, who really gets a kick out of seizing on any imperfect analogies as if that will somehow gloss over what actually happened, claims Harris has swallowed "the Big Lie" about the Lebanese invasion and that two things need to be recognised. Firstly, that Hezbollah is a proxy army of the Iranian government, the latter which intends to destroy Israel and take over the Middle East. This is a fantasy based itself on a big lie: that the blockhead President of Iran once said in a speech that Israel should be wiped off the map. This was based on a mistranslated speech he made in which he in fact said Israel will one day disappear like the Soviet Union, a point he reiterated in a recent interview on Channel 4. It's a disgraceful thing to say, but light years away from claiming it should be eliminated. It is also worth noting that there is no mention in this speech of Iran attacking Israel- this leap has been made by Phillips and her ilk with no evidence and disregarding the fact that the Supreme Leader of Iran is in charge of the armed forces, not Ahmadinejad or any other president. More to the point, Iran is not in charge of Hezbollah, which acts on its own initiative, despite some coordination on foreign policy between the two. As for Hezbollah's cowardly, rancid and unlawful rocket attacks on civillians, invading the country was hardly going to slow them down, and harming civillians in a far greater number was morally reprehensible and hypocritical. More on this below. A suitably strong UN force on the border could have stopped any rocket fire, as it by and large has done after UNIFIL was bolstered after the war. This year in its two reports to the Secretary General UNIFIL has said the border situation has been "generally stable", save for three rockets being launched from south Lebaonon in June by a group calling itself the Jihadi Badr Brigades – Lebanon branch. It is worth adding that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has claimed he is prepared to live with an Israeli state alongside an independent Palestine [it is "a Palestinian matter" he told Seymour Hersh, among others]. Is he serious? Will trashing half a country help in any way?
Phillips, however, doesn't seem to think the Lebanese had it so bad. She has the gall to claim:
"[...] there was no ‘massive loss of civilian life’ — quite the contrary. As far as I know, some 1200 people in Lebanon died during the war. Although it is not known how many of them were Hezbollah soldiers since they disguised themselves as civilians, according to the Israelis 500-600 of these fatalities were actually Hezbollah fighters."
Only 1200 [as far as she knows...]?? By her estimate 600-700 Lebanese civillians died, but that is nothing much for her. Human Rights Watch, which has investigated this conflict thoroughly estimates 900 civillians died, the vast majority due to indiscriminate airstrikes, and many in areas where Hezbollah was not present. But lets have it her way for the sake of argument: 600-700 civillians [for no particularly good reason, displaced persons, damaged infrastructure, money for reconstruction diverted from more useful alternatives and the severely wounded will all be left aside here. If 600-900 lives are worth so little then this stuff is clearly peanuts]. In a 34 day conflict that means between 17 and 21 civillians died a day. "Only relatively small areas of Beirut were bombed", she bleats, ignoring the fact that southern Lebanon was strewn with cluster bombs by the end of the war. As HRW states in its report, Israel:
"carried out widespread bombardment of southern Lebanon, including the massive use of cluster munitions prior to the expected ceasefire, in a manner that did not discriminate between military objectives and civilians."
"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," claimed a head of an IDF rocket unit. These are guaranteed to take the lives of more civillians after the war, much more than Hezbollah's crappy rockets. Philips thinks this was a restrained reaction. It is so easy with anyone with a shred of humanity to sympathise with the Israelis holed up in shelters or forced to flee from rockets, AND the Lebanese whose lives were made a living hell that summer. How does she struggle with this? Is taking sides rather than looking for practical common sense solutions really preferable?
Phillips directs her scorn at Robert Harris, who commented on Blair's pathetic inaction in the summer war. Here is the full quote from the Guardian, with my clarifications in brackets:
"Coming on top of the crazy decision to attack Iraq, it [the aforementioned pathetic inaction] just seemed the ultimate example of a complete collapse of independent British foreign policy. Because the Americans wouldn't condemn Israel, we couldn't say anything either - and yet even a lot of Israelis recognised that it was a massive loss of civilian life, equivalent to the British bombing Dublin to deal with terrorism in Ulster. Without getting into the whole detail of the issue, we should at least have been a bit more even-handed about the whole thing. And I think that that did Blair terrible damage. At that point I think he was doomed, really."
Phillips, who really gets a kick out of seizing on any imperfect analogies as if that will somehow gloss over what actually happened, claims Harris has swallowed "the Big Lie" about the Lebanese invasion and that two things need to be recognised. Firstly, that Hezbollah is a proxy army of the Iranian government, the latter which intends to destroy Israel and take over the Middle East. This is a fantasy based itself on a big lie: that the blockhead President of Iran once said in a speech that Israel should be wiped off the map. This was based on a mistranslated speech he made in which he in fact said Israel will one day disappear like the Soviet Union, a point he reiterated in a recent interview on Channel 4. It's a disgraceful thing to say, but light years away from claiming it should be eliminated. It is also worth noting that there is no mention in this speech of Iran attacking Israel- this leap has been made by Phillips and her ilk with no evidence and disregarding the fact that the Supreme Leader of Iran is in charge of the armed forces, not Ahmadinejad or any other president. More to the point, Iran is not in charge of Hezbollah, which acts on its own initiative, despite some coordination on foreign policy between the two. As for Hezbollah's cowardly, rancid and unlawful rocket attacks on civillians, invading the country was hardly going to slow them down, and harming civillians in a far greater number was morally reprehensible and hypocritical. More on this below. A suitably strong UN force on the border could have stopped any rocket fire, as it by and large has done after UNIFIL was bolstered after the war. This year in its two reports to the Secretary General UNIFIL has said the border situation has been "generally stable", save for three rockets being launched from south Lebaonon in June by a group calling itself the Jihadi Badr Brigades – Lebanon branch. It is worth adding that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has claimed he is prepared to live with an Israeli state alongside an independent Palestine [it is "a Palestinian matter" he told Seymour Hersh, among others]. Is he serious? Will trashing half a country help in any way?
Phillips, however, doesn't seem to think the Lebanese had it so bad. She has the gall to claim:
"[...] there was no ‘massive loss of civilian life’ — quite the contrary. As far as I know, some 1200 people in Lebanon died during the war. Although it is not known how many of them were Hezbollah soldiers since they disguised themselves as civilians, according to the Israelis 500-600 of these fatalities were actually Hezbollah fighters."
Only 1200 [as far as she knows...]?? By her estimate 600-700 Lebanese civillians died, but that is nothing much for her. Human Rights Watch, which has investigated this conflict thoroughly estimates 900 civillians died, the vast majority due to indiscriminate airstrikes, and many in areas where Hezbollah was not present. But lets have it her way for the sake of argument: 600-700 civillians [for no particularly good reason, displaced persons, damaged infrastructure, money for reconstruction diverted from more useful alternatives and the severely wounded will all be left aside here. If 600-900 lives are worth so little then this stuff is clearly peanuts]. In a 34 day conflict that means between 17 and 21 civillians died a day. "Only relatively small areas of Beirut were bombed", she bleats, ignoring the fact that southern Lebanon was strewn with cluster bombs by the end of the war. As HRW states in its report, Israel:
"carried out widespread bombardment of southern Lebanon, including the massive use of cluster munitions prior to the expected ceasefire, in a manner that did not discriminate between military objectives and civilians."
"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," claimed a head of an IDF rocket unit. These are guaranteed to take the lives of more civillians after the war, much more than Hezbollah's crappy rockets. Philips thinks this was a restrained reaction. It is so easy with anyone with a shred of humanity to sympathise with the Israelis holed up in shelters or forced to flee from rockets, AND the Lebanese whose lives were made a living hell that summer. How does she struggle with this? Is taking sides rather than looking for practical common sense solutions really preferable?
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bit of a random comment here, but I could swear that MRI of Bush is actually from my flickr page, as it was ammended by a friend and sent back to me.... http://flickr.com/photos/44734266@N00/131927963/
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