Try not to kill people wearing this
Apparently yesterday* Israel took a break from shelling/murdering Lebanese innocents to shell/murder four UN peacekeepers in a little booth. Here is a rough timetable of the incident:
1) Israel fires at, kills 4 people wearing UN hats in a UN bunker. There is no reason to assume these are Hezbollah guys or anything. Even though they have a lot of missiles, and the guys are only in a little booth, it takes them about 6 hours to kill all the people. Meanwhile, the four guys are apparently calling the UN up on the phone, telling them that they're being shot at and to maybe see if they can call off the guys shooting at them.
2) After the people are dead, somebody tells Kofi Annan that the whole thing smells a little fishy, and Kofi rushes out of a tremendously important comped dinner with Condoleezza and some other people to tell everybody about it.
3) Kofi changes his mind about the intentionality of the attack. Everybody agrees to "conduct an investigation," which doesn't sound much like "hold Israel responsible for the possibly-negligent-or-maybe-not homicide of 4 UN members." Noted jackass John Bolton, meanwhile, is caught cajoling the Chinese into dropping the "possibly-deliberate" rhetoric from their own shit.
Please somebody explain to me why
1) Israel expects us to believe that they really didn't know those guys were UN guys for six hours after repeated phone calls. Maybe the lines were tied up in NYC? Maybe the Israeli military, poor and destitute as it is, couldn't afford satellite phones? Who knows?
2) The probably deliberate murder of 4 UN peacekeepers by a whacko racist aggressor state is not front-page, headline news? I guess washingtonpost.com was busy running that picture of Nelly, and nytimes.com has that sweet Prey story. Portal technology sure is awesome!
Even the washingtonpost "World" section doesn't have it on the frontpage, but they sure as fuck have "Europe sweats through July," which is surely news to anybody who doesn't know that July is usually hot.
*(or something, I'm in Japan, it might have been 2 days to you people, or whatever look it was like 48 hours)
Anyone old enough to remember the USS Stark incident would not be surprised that this is not news.
ReplyDeleteBut it must be noted that
"Hezbullah struck first" is an argument that gives complete legitimacy to any subsequent response in the eyes of the American public, so there's your answer. "Proportionate" revenge is not in the American vocabulary.
Well, what is America going to say? We're talking about a country that when hit by terrorists we attacked the responsible country, and then went on to attack another country that had nothing to do with it -- just for good measure.
ReplyDeleteIts sort of the "If you piss me off, we'll shoot you and the guy standing next to you." mentallity.
Yeah, it's not like Hezbullah would knowingly use UN observers, who were idiotically staged right in the middle of a battlefield, as a shield like other civillians.
ReplyDeleteOh, wait...
"Six days before he was killed in an Israel Air Force bombing of a United Nations post in southern Lebanon, Canadian observer Major Paeta Hess-von Kruendener sent an email to his former commander in the Canadian army, in which he said that Hizbullah fighters were "running around" near the UN post struck by the Israel Defense Forces and that they were using the post as a sort of "shield" against Israel' s strikes."
^^ which obviously makes it ok to kill them. fuck it, hezbollah must be destroyed at all costs! full speed ahead!
ReplyDeletethanks for citing YNETnews, too- it's hard to find an outlet for unbiased and fair journalism on the web these days
Connor, have you played Prey? The portal stuff is really well done and impressive. Don't knock it until you try it. I mean, you can shoot into a series of portals that loop around so your bullets come back and hit yourself!
ReplyDeleteAlso, can we please agree on a spelling for this terrorist group? You guys have it three different ways in four comments! There must be an official spelling--what do they put on their stationery?
--Chris
Alright, how about a Canadian paper?
ReplyDelete"The United Nations appeared to be caught in a contradiction Wednesday after the world body claimed there had been no Hezbollah activity in the vicinity of a peacekeeping base destroyed in an Israeli strike, killing four UN military observers, one of them Canadian.
An e-mail written by Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, identified Wednesday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper as the dead Canadian, reveals Hezbollah was extremely active in the days and weeks before.
...
He also said of Israeli counter-fire to that date: "This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity."