Fretting Over "Asymmetry" in Death Toll for Israel vs. Terrorist Hezbollah
Posted by: Clay Waters
7/19/2006 1:47:09 PM
Has Israel already gone too far, waged too successful of a counterattack against an incursion and double kidnapping by the terrorist group Hezbollah?
As the assault on the Syria-and-Iran backed terrorist group goes on over Lebanon, the Times takes a breath and begins to revert to its usual biases.
Of four photos in Wednesday’s Times, three show images of destruction in Lebanon and Gaza City, although Hezbollah rockets continue to land in the Israeli port city of Haifa and in Nahariya (the Jerusalem Post, for one, has no problem finding pictures of such destruction).
Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Erlanger frets about "asymmetrical" death rates in his lead story, "With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion."
"The asymmetry in the reported death tolls is marked and growing: some 230 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians, to 25 Israeli dead, 13 of them civilians. In Gaza, one Israel soldier has died from his own army’s fire, and 103 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them militants.
"The cold figures, combined with Israeli air attacks on civilian infrastructure like power plants, electricity transformers, airports, bridges, highways and government buildings, have led to accusations by France and the European Union, echoed by some nongovernmental organizations, that Israel is guilty of 'disproportionate use of force' in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and of 'collective punishment' of the civilian populations."
There's an echo there of an infamous comment by the late NBC newsman John Chancellor on the March 12, 1992 Nightly News, after the first Iraq war, when he seemed embarrassed that more American soldiers hadn't been killed: "Greenpeace, the public interest organization, believes that the Iraqi death toll, civilian and military, before and after the war, may be as high as 198,000. Allied military dead are counted in the low hundreds. The disparity is huge and somewhat embarrassing."
Erlanger does let Israelis provide context: "Israel has heard these arguments before. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said, 'Proportionality is not compared to the event, but to the threat, and the threat is bigger and wider than the captured soldiers.'
"Israel is confronting a regional threat, she and the government argue, which begins with Iran and Syria and their proxy, Hezbollah, and stretches to the radical Islamic Palestinian group Hamas.
"Nor does Israel deliberately single out civilians, she argued, as Hezbollah and Hamas do through rocket attacks and suicide bombings. Intent matters, she said.
"But in Gaza and Lebanon, civilians are inevitably harmed when militants hide among them. And in Lebanon, she said, some of the dead may be civilians associated with Hezbollah, assisting it or storing its rockets....'When you go to sleep with a missile,' she said, 'you might find yourself waking up to another kind of missile.' Those arguments leave Lebanese and Gazans cold."
Erlanger won't let it go: "Referring to complaints that Israel was using disproportionate force, Dan Gillerman, Israel's United Nations ambassador, said at a rally of supporters in New York this week, 'You’re damn right we are.'
"'If your cities were shelled the way ours were,' he said, addressing critics, 'you would use much more force than we are or we ever will.'
"Raji Sourani, a Gazan lawyer who founded and directs the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, is running out of patience."
Wednesday's front-page story by Helene Cooper and Steven Erlanger, "Officials Expect Visit by Rice, but Not Yet," relies heavily on unchallenged rhetoric from Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who blames the "international community" for not stopping Israel’s counteroffensive.
"In the interview, Mr. Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, said that he favored a release of the two Israeli soldiers. But he coupled that call with other requirements. Any solution to the crisis, he said, should include Israel's withdrawal from the disputed Shebaa Farms area of the border, the release of Lebanese detainees in Israeli jails and a return to the terms of the 1949 armistice between the two countries."
Cooper and Erlanger should know that even the United Nations admits Israel has left the Shebaa Farms area -- Lebanon’s Syria-controlled government claims that Israel hasn’t just to keep Hezbollah anger stoked.
|
