@sullydish's blog 'The Dish' has the tagline "Biased and Balanced", this article is clearly the former. To quote from the article:
"It also helps distract from the fact that Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens which was the casus belli for the latest Israeli swoop through the West Bank; that Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings, while concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured; and that Israeli public hysteria, tapping into the Gilad-like trauma of captivity, then began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality. It also side-steps the rather awful fact that this nihilist and futile war crime is all that Hamas has really got left."@sullydish starts with the statement "Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens". Israeli intelligence has named two Hamas activists from Hebron, Marwan Kawasmeh, 29, and Amar Abu-Isa, 32, as the prime suspects. Perhaps they are innocent of this heinous crime, perhaps @sullydish has inside knowledge as to whom is the guilty party.
@sullydishgoes onto say "Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings" this is completely untrue and I beg to see a source of this fallacious statement. After the vile revenge killing off 16 Year old Mohammed Abu Khdeir apparently by a mentally unstable Jewish terrorist and his minor accomplices. Netanyahu pointedly denounced the murder of Abu Khdeir in the strongest possible terms and spoke out forcefully against vigilantes taking the law into their own hands. jpost ref
The "casus belli" was not the murder of the 3 boys but rather a huge escalation in rockets fired at Israel by Hamas, it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Hamas was looking for an escalation and it's continued refusal to accept a cease fire shows that it still wants the status quo to continue. Why ? read Jeffery Goldberg's article above. for some intelligent insight.
His next statement is also incorrect "concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured". While the teens were killed soon after capture the only evidence were shots heard an audio recording of the telephone call placed by Naftali Frankel to the police. This left ample room for reasonable doubt as to whether the boys were alive. The families of the victims were party to this evidence and they still had hope of finding their sons alive.
"began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality" @sullydish is completely correct in his description here but the wording leaves me with the feeling that multiple brutal incidents occurred, where the facts are that there where some minor incidents and one truly despicable murder.
"Yes, they conceal armaments and rockets and weapons in civilian areas – and that undoubtedly increases civilian deaths. But what alternative do they have exactly, if they wish to have any military capacity at all? Should they build clearly demarcated camps and barracks and munitions stores, where the IDF could just destroy them at will? As for the argument that no democratic society could tolerate terrorist attacks without responding with this kind of disproportionate force, what about the country I grew up in, where pubs and department stores in the mainland were blown up, where the prime minister and her entire cabinet were bombed and some killed in a hotel? I don’t recall aerial bombing of Catholic areas in Belfast, do you? Or fatality numbers approaching 200 – 0? Democratic countries are marked by this kind of restraint – not by calls for revenge and bombardment of a densely populated urban area, where civilian casualties, even with the best precision targeting and warnings, are inevitable."
His next paragraph is possible the most abhorrent. @sullydish is excusing the use of human shields because it works. Why does it work, it works because the Israeli army according to Col. Richard Kemp testimony at U.N. in 2009 does more to safeguard the rights of Palestinian civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Richard Kemp's Testimony . There is no justification ever for using human shields it is indefensible.
Sullivan then uses a very weak and factually incorrect argument to try and show British moral superiority when dealing with the IRA and condemning Israel's . He uses the Brighton hotel bombing as an example to show that the British did not retaliate by bombing Catholic Belfast. "prime minister and her entire cabinet were bombed and some killed in a hotel" , no member of the cabinet was killed. Brighton_hotel_bombing , but that is beside the point. Belfast was "Occupied" by the British, where Gaza is a self governed territory without any ground access to Israeli forces. Israel has never had aerial bombardment against any city in the West Bank which they can access to capture any terrorists. Hamas attacks Israeli civilians indiscriminately. The IRA targets for the most part were not intended to cause civilian casualties. Their standard practice was to give advance warning of any bombs to avoid civilian casualties. Hamas tries to maximise civilian or other casualties. @sullydish's analogy is at best extremely weak.
"And there is, for all the talk of aggression on both sides, no serious equivalence in capabilities between Hamas and the IDF. The IDF has the firepower to level Gaza to the ground if it really wants to. Hamas, if it’s lucky, might get a rocket near a town or city. I suppose Israel’s reluctance just to raze Gaza for good and all is why John McCain marveled that in a war where one side has had more than 170 fatalities, 1,200 casualties, 80 percent of whom are civilians, and the other side has no fatalities and a handful of injuries, Israel has somehow practiced restraint. One wonders what no restraint would mean."
This next paragraph is almost totally accurate for @sullydish. It is a pity that his tone is sarcastic because he has hit the nail on the head. I could not have said it better. The only fact I could contest is the 80% but that number is too difficult to prove or to disprove, I nor anyone else knows the real number.
"And look at the image above (IMAGE of a bombed Mosque). Part of our skewed perspective is revealed by it. Imagine for a second that Hamas had leveled a synagogue. Can you imagine what Israel would feel justified in doing as a response? Or imagine if a Jewish extended family of 18 had been massacred by Hamas, including children? Would we not be in a major international crisis? At some point the lightness with which we treat Palestinian suffering compared with Jewish suffering needs to be addressed as an urgent moral matter. The United States is committed to human rights, not rights scaled to one’s religious heritage or race."
In his next paragraph sully requests to to imagine some hypothetical incidents and the fallout. I do not know why he did not consult history. He says imagine a family of 18 were killed , what about the Passover massacre with 33 killed. Back at the time when this happened I have heard that Sullivan was actually a staunch pro Iraq war supporter and a supporter of Israel, apparently he changed allegiances, to the left since apparently because of the Bush administrations stance on gay issues. There have been many synagogue bombings by Palestinian terrorists over the years none of these synagogue was suspected of being a weapons cache where Israel had the pictures to prove it. Israel Hits Mosque
"But this morning, as if to balance Hamas’s blame for every single death in the conflict, Goldblog feels the need to chide the Israeli prime minister for his “mistake” in having utter contempt for any two-state solution. “Mistake” is an interesting word to use."
I did notice that he had misspelled Goldberg and Goldblog in the following paragraph, I thought this was appropriate as he would not want to sully his record of factual inconsistencies in every paragraph.
I could not read further I felt sullied by the irrational hate levelled at Israel.
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