Still Waiting

I'm hearing cries of outrage from the world over "Israeli war crimes." Where are the accusations against the organization that launches rockets from civilian population centers, in the cynical hope that the world will respond to Israel's predictable actions in exactly the way it is?

I can no longer take seriously any of these so-called human rights organizations.

[Update a few minutes later]

I'm watching video on Fox News of rocket trails (presumably Hezbollah rocket trails) departing from a building that reportedly looks very much like the one that was hit in Qana.

[Update a few minutes after that]

Well, there's not complete silence:

THE UN's humanitarian chief Jan Egeland called for a three-day truce to evacuate civilians and transport food and water into cut-off areas...

...Mr Egeland blasted Hezbollah as "cowards" for operating among civilians.

"When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children," he said.

The accompanying picture is indeed damning, but this denunciation aside, the general asymmetry of the criticism, and the associated media coverage, remains sickening.

It bears repeating: Israelis kill civilians when they miss their targets. Hezbollah (and other terrorist organizations) kill civilians when they hit theirs.

[Update at mid-Sunday morning]

Josh Trevino has further thoughts on the asymmetry:

Let us call the childrens' deaths in Qana what they are: a horrific freak of war. They were not intended; they were not actively sought; and they were not the product of criminal negligence. In weeks of war and thousands of sorties against a foe that intentionally hides amongst civilians in the active hope of just this manner of carnage, the remarkable fact is that this hasn't happened before. Contrary to founding advocates of airpower -- and unlike its battlefield foes -- Israel does not seek the death of civilians for their own sake. Pace the rationalizations extended to Allied aircrews obliterating Western European villagers unfortunate enough to live near a rail junction, Israel does not even regard acceptance of this manner of death -- unintended, incidental, and not worth especial efforts to preclude -- as acceptable within the moral parameters of war. The uninformed and the insane will react with bitter derision upon being told this, on the heels of the news from Qana: but their emotional self-indulgence does not negate the fact at hand.

Need it be said -- and it is a sign of our fallen age that it does need to be said -- Israel's enemy in this war operates under no such constraint. (One assumes that in bygone days, the difference between a Western democracy and a band of murderous savages would not need repeated explanation.) Hezbollah and the average Islamist do not shrink from direct assaults on civilians as such and as an end in itself. Indeed, it has been their sole tactic in this entire war. If they have not produced scenes of masses of dead children, it is not for lack of trying -- it is, after all, the only thing they try for. That they have not managed it is indicative of the confluence of blind luck and Israeli battlefield superiority. But give it time: give it infinite time to launch its rockets and try its luck, as the braying proponents of ceasefire would have it, and eventually we'll see Jewish children, too, incinerated in their sleep. The difference, of course, is that the perpetrators then will celebrate.