See, here’s how my brain works.
Back when the U.S. was invading Afghanistan and Iraq, I don’t recall any calls for a cease-fire by any other nations.
I don’t think there’s been a single instance of Israeli self-defense where the world has not called for an immediate cease-fire, thus hampering and handcuffing the Israeli response.
So when I read something like this, the cynic in me says, STFU:
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Monday joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in calling for the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon, in order to end the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hezbullah.
Villepin also called for an immediate truce between Israel and Lebanon on humanitarian grounds.
De Villepin was speaking after meeting the Lebanese government in Beirut in an effort to find a solution to the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.
“Humanitarian grounds”? Hezbullah is sending missiles into the heart of Israeli towns and cities. They obviously don’t give a damn about humanitarianism. One would think that, by definition, a terrorist organization is not humanitarian. Let us be honest: The grounds for the cease-fire are that Israel is bombing the crap out of her enemy, and for once, is not heeding calls to stop. This time, as the movie tagline goes, it’s personal.
Israel on Monday reiterated its opposition to the initiative of deploying an international force in Lebanon.
The Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday night that Israel would not agree to the deployment of any troops in south Lebanon, save for the Lebanese army.
Israel is concerned that an international force would make it more difficult for the IDF to respond to future attacks from Lebanese territory.
Why exactly would that be? Because the UN peacekeepers are already complicit in the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbullah.
On October 7, 2000, Hezbollah forces illegally crossed the Israeli border with Lebanon through a UN patrolled area and kidnapped three Israel Defense Force soldiers, Adi Avitan, Binyamin Avraham, and Omar Souad. UNIFIL peacekeepers videotaped the incident; however, the United Nations denied possessing any such videotape for almost nine months. On July 6, 2001, The UN admitted, contrary to their earlier denials, that they had possession of the tape as of 18 hours after the incident occurred.
The Israeli government requested the tape to help investigate the incident and hopefully recover the soldiers. However, the United Nations refused to turn the tape over to Israel, citing a desire to maintain a neutral role in the region. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer sent a strongly worded letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on July 8, 2001, calling the UN’s decision not to hand over the video “altogether puzzling and incongruous.”[1] UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno responded by claiming that since “South Lebanon is a war zone,” giving an unedited tape to Israel, “would be considered by one party as providing intelligence to another party and would certainly put in danger the security of our people in Lebanon.”[2] Israeli officials pointed out that not only was Israel the victim in this kidnapping, but that the UNIFIL officials ought to have prevented the abduction in the first place, fulfilling their mandate as peacekeepers – it was their job to keep the area from becoming a war zone.
Israel remembers. Pull the other leg, Kofi. This one isn’t working.
Hezbollah just hit a hospital in safed.
Israel should announce that it will attack a Lebanese hospital in order to maintain the principle of proportional response.
Israel should start using MOAB bombs in Lebanon..and start annexing all Lebanese territory.
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I think you are partly mistaken with respect to the double standard. Although there is a double standard, the appropriate comparison is not with the U.S. Do you remember all the demands that the US stop military action during Ramadan? That was because Ramadan was very sacred to Muslims, a time of peace, as demonstrated by the 1967 Arab-Israeli war taking place during Ramadan. The double standard is with respect to everyone else. For example, to take a not-so-bad (as it could have been) example, the Irish government is putting the onus on the Israeli government to stop the fighting, but when the IRA started waging war on Ireland in the 1950s, the Irish government interred everyone who even looked IRA. The only time Israel gets hit with a double standard and the US does not is when the costs of applying the double standard to the US get too high. The efforts by British academics to boycott Israel never got extended to the US, even though the boycott advocates hate the US as much, because no serious academic wants to cut off dealings with the US, where the money is.
I think you mean the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which is known in Egypt and Muslim lands as the Ramadan War.
But true, the appropriate comparison is with, gee, the rest of the world minus the U.S., as the U.S. gets bashed quite a lot on her own.