“What, after all, can we expect from Hamas or Hezbollah?”
After giving the standard platitudes about Israel’s right to defend itself (”No self-respecting state would stand idly by while rockets fall on its cities”), LA Times opinion writer, David Myers, gets to what he really thinks (via Jill):
Of course, Israel is not solely to blame for the escalating violence. But as a sovereign state with a major army, it has to be the most responsible party. What, after all, can we expect from Hamas or Hezbollah?
Silly me. I expect Hamas and Hezbollah to respect the dignity of human life and to not endanger civilians by using them as human shields. I expect them to realize the danger of a multi-front war at a time when Iran is developing nuclear weapons and to release the captured soldiers before the situation escalates even further.
But Myers, lacing his words with vile racism, thinks that’s too much to ask. We can’t possibly expect them to, you know, actually do the right thing. We just demand that of Israel. Those dumb Arabs just don’t know any better. And I thought the right was supposed to be “anti-Arab”.
Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. Obviously, it’s ludicrous to “expect Hamas and Hezbollah to respect the dignity of human life and to not endanger civilians by using them as human shields.” That doesn’t mean we can’t hold them accountable for it, which he says and you dismiss as “platitudes.” There’s absolutely nothing racist about Myers’s statement. He’s just pointing out that when a rational party is engaged with an irrational one, the rational one is the only one that can be reasonable.
Your misunderstanding arises from your conflation of “expect” and “accept,” which is not present in his words.
Comment by JewishAtheist — July 14, 2006 @ 1:32 pm
JA, I strongly disagree. Your labelling of terrorists as irrational amounts to an insanity defense for terrorism.
In order to hold someone accountable for their wrongs, you must first implicitly qualify them as responsible for their actions. To call them irrational IS to absolve them of responsibility.
Hezbollah’s rockets may not have guidance systems, but Hezbollah fighters are rational enough that they only point them South, towards Israel. Hezbollah guerillas are not hearing voices, declaring jihad on imaginary penguins or running naked through the streets of Beirut. And their hiding amongst civilians betrays some cold calculations that are quite rational indeed, and I think an insanity defense for them would be thrown out in court.
You say we should still hold them “accountable”. But if they’re not rational beings, for what can they account? If they’re not rational beings, we should capture them and give them psychiatric care.
I know you’re not a racist, JA. You may contradict yourself, but one of the sides of your argument is accountability. Yet plenty of people DO actually absolve Islamist terrorists of any responsibility. I don’t know whether that’s racist, or rather xenophobic, religionist, culturist, or something else entirely. In other words, would a white Islamist terrorist be labelled irrational? Or an Arab Christian? I don’t know in either case. But I know it’s terribly demeaning to somebody or other to imply that the group’s terrorists are like mere rabid animals.
Comment by Seth Chalmer — July 23, 2006 @ 3:41 pm