“If you rely on the American press, it is simply impossible to figure out what is going on in the West Bank,” writes David Brooks in The Weekly Standard. “For example, in Thursday’s New York Times there was an inept front page story entitled, Attacks turn Palestinian Dream Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust. Then inside there was another story, The Assault Is Over, the Casbah Is in Ruins.”
Notes Brooks:
Both stories, like most of the rest of the American media, leave the impression that Israeli troops are ransacking civilian areas, destroying homes, and shooting defenseless civilians.
But if that image is true, how is it that dozens of Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat? How is it that after Palestinians surrender, the ground is littered with bombs and guns? It seems as if there are real battles going on, which are not being reported. If there are real battles, what are they like? Are terrorists being killed or captured?
To get answers to these questions, you have to go web surfing.
Yup. And lots of folks are doing just that, too.
If the US Army decided to plough its way through West LA, it would suffer casualties and the ground would be littered with weapons.
So what? Would that somehow prove that West LA is NOT a residential area and that some or most of the casualties are not innocent civilians?
I have no idea what that means, Jak. Are you admitting that the West Bank is Israel’s to begin with? Because the last time I checked, West LA was part of the U.S.
Maybe he’s saying that we should give West LA to the Palestinians.
That might be OK, as long as the Jews retain the right of return to the Fairfax District.
Your assertion suffers from a terminal flaw, Jak. If the US military decided to plow through West LA whether or not they took casualties would very much depend on how they decided to go about it.
If, say, they only wanted to get the drug dealers and destroy the crack houses, they almost certainly would take casualties because drug dealers have an unfortunate habit of shooting people. It would require only careful use of heavier firepower and an awful lot of house-to-house warfare – the most dangerous kind there is. Most likely they would take casualties, most likely they would end up accidentally killing a few civilians and purposefully killing a whole lot of bad guys who were shooting at them.
If, on the other hand, the US military decided to take out all of West LA because, say, they didn’t like the people there or what have you, it would be entirely a different story. Simply surround the area with 155mm and 8inch artillery batteries with tanks and troops to defend them and then lob in shells all the live long day from ten miles away. There wouldn’t be, if you’ll excuse the expression, Jak anyone in West LA would be able to do about it. If you’re in a hurry add in a few dozen helicopter gunships firing a bazillion hellfire missiles, periodic passes from various fighter/bombers and/or bombers, perhaps some missile launchers around the perimeter just for good measure. Once you’ve spent a while leveling the place, send in the tanks – which pretty much no one in West LA would have an effective defense against – to mop things up. Guess what, pretty much no causalities for the military and West LA would be suitable for paving. And there wouldn’t even be much of anyone left to complain about it.
Israel is fully capable of the latter if she wished. If all this was about was killing Palestinians, why didn’t they? They chose the former, and far more hazardous to them, course because this isn’t about just killing Palestinians, this is about trying to get at the terrorist infrastructure and stop them from randomly killing civilians.
Myria