Senator Marco Rubio points out about the explosion of violence between Israel and Palestinians: “The only response that you’ve seen from Israel is in response to these [Arab] attacks, and they live in a very tough neighborhood and they’ve made abundantly clear if you hit us, we’re going to hit you back five times harder.” This is reminiscent of tactics used by Nazis in German-occupied Europe, in which they promised to kill 50 locals for every German soldier killed by the Resistance.
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Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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At least they’re keeping it European. The Nazis slaughtered entire villages here under like circumstances instead of wasting their time counting people. Before them, during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks introduced the official policy of killing every fifth person in a village if there was any sign of “bandit” activity nearby (greater transgressions than allowing people to pass nearby in secret led to greater reprisals). This is medium level reprisal policy.
I hate to be cynical. I really do because it makes me seem like I have no heart. (But I do. At least I used to.)
I suspect that the Israeli “Iron Dome” could achieve 100% efficacy. But if it did, the Israelis really couldn’t send their high-tech missiles over to blow up scores of Palestinians. There’s no way to spin killing a couple dozen people after an “attack” that caused zero fatalities for your side. So the Israelis let a few of the Palestinian missiles get through. Gots to keep them war funds flowing. Emerson was right. “Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind.”
Thanks for broaching this topic, Ted.
In conversation long ago with a Jewish social worker friend with whom I have frequently vacationed, I brought up the familiar [to him] concept that children of abusive parents tend themselves to become abusers as adults.
I brought up with him the concept of Hitler as the abusive parent of the Zionists in Israel who need a new father figure, one other that of the “Great White Father” in Washington, known as such by another indigenous people dismissed by him as brutes to be exterminated.
I also brought up the concept of war as collective punishment, one that readily escalates to the multilateral mass murders that makes Charles Manson look like a choir boy, also in his case in the name of a collective race war.
I don’t have a problem with using defensive targeted violence when necessary, but I am opposed to collective violence in all of its forms. This is a position that brought Muhammad Ali [and me, with much less notoriety] into conflict with the laws of a fascist state, one I recognized as such before I was twenty.
Re Rubio: ” … they live in a very tough neighborhood … ”
More accurately, they were plopped down into a very tough neighborhood in which the West wanted influence under the standard series of heartwarming, if cynical and manipulative, guises.