Public Comment
Joseph Anderson
Friday July 25, 2014 - 08:15:00 AM
The Palestinians have no fighter jet interceptors, no air defense systems, not even any Stinger missiles that Israel's air force has to worry about. Thus, Israel's military aircraft have 'all the time in the world', so to speak, to leisurely loiter above Gaza, and the tactical freedom to fly relatively low there, with Israel's fighter jets, helicopter gunships, and armed drones. And, not merely with old-fashion gravity-only bombs, subject to winds or errors relating to jet airspeed, release, and bombsight parallax, but, instead, with missiles, bombs, and shells with the latest in pinpoint guidance technology (video, laser, precision GPS, precision radar, infrared, wire, night-vision, or computer-guided).
This allows Israel to pick and set up its targets carefully (i.e., precisely the targets Israel wants to pick), picking most targets using aerial imagery before Israel's military aircraft (or ships and tanks) even leave their bases, besides civilians of opportunity targets.
We've seen that U.S. armed drones, flying high and far from their targets, controlled from a flight room in another country, can bomb a single moving vehicle whose occupants couldn't even hear the drone!
So, since Israel has 'all the time in the world' and all the latest targeting technology to leisurely set up its missile, bombing and shelling targets, I say let's get real!: If Israel's pinpoint targeting is killing so many civilians, destroying so many civilian homes, and killing groups of women and girls with or without small children or babies at hand, or teen boys just hangin' out and chatting while sitting on the sidewalk, and even little kids on the beach (was Hamas storing rockets under them, too?), as well as Israel striking hospitals, and even the very emergency rooms, surgery rooms, and ICU rooms of those hospitals (which I'm sure Israel had previously all mapped out), then Israel is, indeed, pinpoint targeting precisely those civilians, hospitals, schools, UN refugee compounds (often containing very many women and children moved there), and even kids on the beach that Israel wants to target.
If it were the U.S. government's enemies who were obviously targeting civilians, the drinking water and sewage systems, hospitals, and even children, like Israel is obviously doing, the U.S. government and mainstream media would spare no howling outrage and call for immediate UN Security Council sessions to sanction and embargo its enemies, not allow its enemies' officials to fly on Western airliners, and have the Hague issue immediate international arrest warrants not only for war crimes, but, indeed, for wanton and indiscriminate mass crimes against humanity.
To be morally blunt, Israel's assault on Gaza is akin to the Nazi assault on the Warsaw ghetto (with its tunnels and smuggled or handmade weapons, too!) -- I have heard some Jews of moral conscience make that same, unavoidable comparison -- and about as much oppressor "unoccupied."
(Now, I wonder what Noam Chomsky would say about that?...: "That it's alll under the U.S. government's direction?: that Israel is just ffolllowwing orrrderzzz..."? And where have we heard that 'defense,' before?)
