Under criticism for its lack of objectivity, the London-based Amnesty International announced Wednesday that Hizbullah’s firing of thousands of rockets into Israel amounted to “war crimes.”
The findings, which appear in a new 15-page report, come three weeks after the human rights group issued a previous report which called Israeli strikes “war crimes,” but failed to mention Hizbullah’s rocket attacks. –from this news article
This tiny postscript comes two weeks after the massive manuscript (“‘Israelis Committed War Crimes,’ says Amnesty International”) was distributed far and wide. To the little addendum, dangling, The Times will devote a tiny particle of an article, deep inside — not the massive coverage given to that massive “Israelis Committed War Crimes” manuscript published to worldwide acclaim a few weeks ago.
Why bother with the addendum, the little lean-to, the pretend-condemnation of heroic Hizballah? To establish a claim to “fairness.” To establish a claim to “equal-opportunity” denunciation. To farcically pretend that Amnesty International, Ms. Khan’s nasty little domain, which has little in common (just like the U.N.) with what it started as and what it was intended to be, is fair.
But why, one may ask, if there was going to be a report on Hizballah, did not Amnesty International hold both its reports and release them simultaneously? Why did it rush out, and rush out without bothering to find out how Hizballah had conducted its war? Why didn’t it consider the 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 or 8,000 rockets fired completely indiscriminately into Israel and, where possible, into its third major city, Haifa (the biggest city those rockets could reach)? Why didn’t it take testimony as to the placement of Hizballah’s own weaponry smack in the middle, always and everywhere, of civilians, and the more civilians, of course, the better for Hizballah?
This is a late, belated, too-late, utterly phony, half-hearted “symmetrical” condemnation of what is not symmetrical at all. For Hizballah wished to hit Israeli civilians and wished to fire only from among civilians in Lebanon — while the Israelis took great pains (leafletting, computer-generated phone calls warning people to leave, constantly holding fire so that warnings could be acted on) to avoid civilian casualties. And as anyone familiar with warfare knows, the number of genuine civilian casualties in a month of fighting in Lebanon was ridiculously, absurdly low by the standards of any other war, fought by any other army (including the American, British, and other allied armies, in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World War II, or any of a hundred other conflicts over the past few decades). That is testimony to the great efforts of Israel.
Nothing at all.
Disgust at this once-reputable organization. Disgust with all of those organizations infiltrated either directly, or indirectly, by those who promote the goals of an Islamintern International — the E.U., the U.N., the assorted holier-than-thou “non-governmental” repositories for those of a certain mindset, a mindset that will never ever detect, for example, the threat of a belief-system that uncompromisingly divides the world between Believer and Infidel, and imposes the duty of Jihad, active participation or support of others directly engaged, in order to remove all “obstacles” (such as free speech, and free exercise of belief, and the legal equality of women and non-Muslims) to the spread of Islam, until such time as Islam everywhere dominates and Muslims rule, everywhere.
By its very nature, such organizations as Amnesty International cannot make moral judgments. But of course they do. They make moral judgments by not making them. They make moral judgments by equating Israel’s attempts to defend itself against those who if they could would entirely efface the state of Israel as an Infidel cancer, or to use that other telling metaphor, a “knife in the heart” of Arab Muslim lands. Hizballah is, to the intelligent, an obvious fascistic movement, akin to the Stormtroopers: the black-shirted black-balaclaved Kalashnikov-clutching bezonians goosestepping their way into Lebanese, Arab, Muslim history, as they terrorize within Lebanon, and attempt — so far unsuccessfully — to terrorize Israel and others without.
Irene Khan and her court cannot see this. Instead, they must insist on a symmetry that is false and grotesque, and indeed, false even its “symmetrical” denunciation — because the noise and the lights and the music all attended the denunciation of Israel, while the criticism of Hizballah has another tone. The latter is quietly dropped into the world’s press, which, by this point, finds the whole matter no longer, somehow, of moment. After all, there was only one real story: that was the one about very wicked Israel. That was what counted.
Disgust rampant, on a field gules.