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I do deplore however the tactics of terrorism regardless of who does them, and in the recent past, the terrorist folk have killed far more muslims than the jews or americans. or so it seems to me.

Did you read Con Yank’s post that marc linked to? He does just that and tries to make the case that the dead bodies there were killed elsewhere.

Did I read above that you reside in Tokyo? I hear thier military is being expanded – is this true?

You guys come here with the lamest, most partisan, hyper-ideological crap imaginable – Woody being one of the worst – and you’ve got the nerve to come off whining about “true believers that can see only one side of an argument” keeping poor, fragile right-wing blowhards from commenting ? Give me a break. Marc characterized what was obviously wild speculation as precisely that…wild speculation. And you clowns come back arguing that because something was POSSIBLE, we were idiots and hacks for not bowing and scaping before morons claiming that a particular event was undoubtedly staged – primarily because it would fit their agenda better if it was. Your bait-and-switch argument that Marc, et. al. criticizing ConYank’s evidentiary standards is somehow an inability to imagine possibilities – because (who knew?) Hezbollah are rotten bastards – is pathetic. Imagining possiblities was never at issue. Responding to a particular argument was. The reaction from right commenters was childish, ignorant sleight of hand – stuff that’s typical of the right blowhardsphere when their attempts at argument from evidence fail. It’s a fallback to ideology over critical thinking or analysis. And you’ve got the nerve to toss around your “true believers” cliche. Go tell it to your comrades Misha and Woody, if you’re such a tribune of objectivity and rational discourse. Once you’ve cleaned out your closet, maybe more of us here might take you seriously. I often disagree with Ahmed but his standards of discourse are far more competent than your pal Woody’s – or most of your own for that matter. He may be many things – and is certainly well to my left – but fatuous isn’t one of them. And he doesn’t resort to being a crybaby when he gets pushback from some of the rest of us.

What a profound lack of self-awareness your childish whining betrays.

Again, I apologize for my intemperate language!

I do not apologize however for the essense of what I said, that the tone in this thread is decidely one sided in a conflict that very obviously has two sides. I could have looked up the HRW link and I didn’t and there is no excuse for that so thank you Michael for the link.

You guys come here with the lamest, most partisan crap imaginable – Woody being the worst – and you’ve got the nerve to come off whining about “true believers that can see only one side of an argument” keeping poor, fragile right-wing blowhards from commenting here ? Give me a break. Marc characterized what was obviously wild speculation as precisely that…wild speculation. And you clowns come back arguing that because something was POSSIBLE, we were idiots and hacks for not bowing and scaping before morons claiming something was probably true – primarily because it would fit their agenda better if it was. Your bait-and-switch argument that criticizing ConYank’s evidentiary standards is somehow an inability to imagine possibilities – because (who knew?

What a profound lack of self-awareness your childish whining betrays.

It was utterly irrelevant as to Qana, especially as the facts have borne out. Stupid claims? Consider your comment on HRW and how that was quickly dissected.

And here’s a head nod right back at you Michael Turner. Reading through your comments,which are always well informed and thoughtful,I can tell that we’ve got some substancial differences, moral, political and historical. That said I’ve always appreaciated what you’ve brought to the table. Gm Roper on the other hand acts the part of a quintessential demegogue and clearly isnt above making up outright and laughable lies (HRW doesn’t document hezbollah’s targetting of civilains) And if im going to dwell on personalities can i send a shout out to this lovely commentator

http://tinyurl.com/pp3hn

What Ed said. And thanks, Ed. To the rest of you: Scroll back up and read it if you haven’t.

But also: what I said. The term “war crime” should be regarded as an armed grenade bouncing into the overheated salon of war-of-words discourse, until context and user intent proves otherwise. Too bad we don’t have the blog-comment-section equivalent of an on-call bomb squad.

Actually, GM, they have.

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/07/18/lebano13760.htm

What, you don’t have time to dig? But that’s a link I turned up in under 7 seconds by googling on “human rights watch” and “hezbollah”. And under a reasonable assumption: HRW cares about human rights violations no matter who is perpetrating them.

Do your homework before using an unlikely assumption as any part of some justification for calling Ahmed a “jerk”, a “fatuous bump on the body politic”, and “pathetic”. Maybe it takes one to know one? Ahmed is a partisan, to be sure, but I value his contributions here and can’t bring myself to treat his biases with the lack of sympathy you demonstrate.

HRW is hardly free of bias (see my posting immediately above) but that bias is toward alarmism about human rights violations. That alarmism earns my sympathy even if it can’t win my approval. I sympathize with HRW even when it misleads me, in part because it’s nonpartisan, but mostly because they’ve signed up for what must be a very frustrating job: trying to get people’s attention without resorting to partisan appeal. That alarmism can backfire–partisans will selectively seize on alarmist statements from HRW for ammunition in the war of words. Every overstatement is a potential embarrassment for HRW, one that could undermine their clout in the long term. But avoiding alarmism over the long term must not seem to HRW a very attractive option in the face of short-term opportunities to make a difference that could save lives. Heart can win out over head even if you’re not aligned with any particular side.

On the other hand … Much as I hate to impugn HRW in their treatment of this theater of war, they are not impeccable just because they are ardent defenders of human rights and devoted to exposure of violations thereof. I already have impugned them, about another theater: Iraq. Tony Blair mouthed off about how mass graves in Iraq held some 400,000 bodies, based on estimates in an HRW report, and ended up retracting that statement when those estimates were shown to be laughably inflated.

HRW goes over the top sometimes. Here’s just one sample from the report Ahmed links.

“As demonstrated by the case studies below, Israel has caused large-scale civilian casualties by striking civilian homes, with no apparent military objective either inside the home or in the vicinity.”

Now that’s very sad, but I don’t think Israel can be blamed for having no *apparent* military objectives for such strikes when it’s dealing with an enemy that’s hiding weapons and fighters, and hazy intelligence about locations. All military forces make efforts at concealment, but there are right and wrong ways to do this, and Hezbollah’s ways are wrong. That doesn’t mean that everything that Israel is doing right now is right. But remember: I’m restricting my criticism on Qana to the objection that it shouldn’t be called a “massacre.” If this was is a game where the “loser” is the side that ended up having more war criminals, well, I think Hezbollah already won that game, long ago. Every single missile launch they’ve done so far is a war crime.

And what about HRW’s “large-scale civilian casualties”? Pardon me for perhaps suffering from an overdose of historical perspective, but I live in a city (Tokyo) that endured an Amerian fire-bombing attack. That attack is estimated to have killed over 300 times as many civilians in under 24 hours as have died so far in the air assaults on Lebanon over a period of more than three weeks. And killing civilians was clearly the point, in the case of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. If hundreds of civilians dying is “large-scale”, I wonder what HRW would have called the firebombing (and nuclear bombing) of Japan? “Super Duper Jumbo Colossal Scale”?

If the idea is help nail the worst war criminals as measured by some weighted formula taking into account number of civilian deaths and degree of intent, I say we should all forget about Lebanon for the moment and try to get Robert Macnamara (who, along with Curtis LeMay, planned the firebombings, and not just of Tokyo but every major city in Japan) arrested and brought up on charges of genocide at ICC. After working down through a list of thousands still living around the world (Henry Kissinger way up there, of course), we might get to Nasrallah. And after taking care of many more lower-priority cases after Nasrallah, we might finally arrive at some trigger-happy colonel in the Israeli air force in this current war in Lebanon.

Israel is committing war crimes. Hezbollah is committing war crimes. But do you think there’s ever going to be a Middle East War Crimes Tribunal? One with any kind of objectivity? I don’t think so. Legal norms only get traction when there’s a functioning judicial system and an effective police. We don’t have anything like that for arbitrating human rights violations in the Middle East conflict, a war that has to end before judicial proceedings can begin. Until we do, the term “war crime” is going to be more a rhetorical element of the political arsenal than anything objectively meaningful. It’ll be part of the war of words, in which you trump up and overstate the enemy’s “war crimes” and minimize or rationalize your own.

I trust I’ve offended everybody at this point.

This mischaracterizes the position of people who question what happened at Qana. No one disputes that the IDF bombed Qana, hit the building under question, and that an unknown number of women and children died.

Why and according to what justification was the building bombed? Were Party of God operatives firing from the building? Did the building collapse from the IDF bombing or from a later explosion. Did any of those “trophy fish” bodies, as sts puts it so well, come from offsite?

All of these are questions of fact. Who objects to facts?

Assuming and conceding no facts about Qana, one might still object to Israel’s response to the Party of God’s provocations.

But Qana seems to be a necessary thing to fix on. When you are an alleged “progressive,” attempting to draw a moral equivelance between an open democratic society on record as wanting peaceful co-existence and a sexist, homophobic, facist theocracy on record as calling for the destruction of a nation, well….