On January 3, 2008, Alan Dershowitz wrote an article carried by a number of publications including the Huffington Post under the title: Targeted Killing Is Working, So Why Is The Press Not Reporting It?" While this is not exactly a model of intellectual integrity or brilliance, it is an attempt at getting there which brings me to volunteer a helping hand.
Stung by criticism over the casualties that Israel has inflicted on the civilians of Lebanon especially around the Beirut area where there were no combatants during the last war, Dershowitz spoke in the name of Israel and said in effect: Forget about what we did in Lebanon; look at what we did in Palestine before that war. You will find that we did not butcher as many civilians as we used to, therefore feel free to pat us on the back and blow us your kisses.
Well, he did not exactly ask for kisses but here is what he said: "This is a story that should be widely reported and carefully analyzed. Silence in the face of this improvement is misleading, since it leads many to believe that there have been no improvements since the dark days of the Intifada. Misleading by silence is as grievous a journalistic sin as misleading by mistake. The time has come to correct this sin and set the record straight."
Before we go further with this, we must remind ourselves of what has come to be known as the Alan Dershowitz Doctrine. This is an idea first enunciated by the man to the effect that you cannot criticize Israel for doing something that someone else has done before. It was the response that Dershowitz had given to criticism leveled against Israel more than a generation before the Intifada to the effect that the Israeli army was employing Nazi-like tactics to fight Palestinian freedom fighters who up to that time had done nothing more than throw the occasional stone at Israeli tanks engaged in the demolition of Palestinian homes.
This doctrine has now mutated, mushroomed, changed faces and deployed to justify everything that Israel does in the Middle East and everything that the Jewish lobby does everywhere else, especially here in North America. For example, to deprive an American citizen of his or her constitutional right to free speech, the Jewish lobby would say: "Look what they are doing in Saudi Arabia," or some other place for that matter.
And the lobby does not even bother to show what they are doing out there, it only insinuates that something similar to curtailing free speech is happening somewhere else then proceeds to trample on the First Amendment of the American Constitution. Boiled down to its essence the Dershowitz doctrine says that what is good for every goose out there is good for the Jewish gander down here.
It is therefore not surprising to see that a variation on this mentality is manifested in the Dershowitz article. When he responds to criticism leveled against Israel for the war in Lebanon with what he claims is proof of Israel's humanity towards the Palestinians, Dershowitz says in effect: Accept the atrocities we committed against the Lebanese because previous to that we did better in Palestine; so go ahead and blow us your proverbial kisses.
My response to this is that the criticism concerning the war in Lebanon still stands and if Dershowitz wants to take up that subject he is welcome to do so. What I reject off hand is the attempt to whitewash Israel's image with regard to Palestine then use the bathwater to smother the crimes committed in Lebanon.
To agree to this diabolic scheme is to give Israel the green light to continue butchering her civilian neighbors and agree to ignore the crimes that she will want to commit in the future. In a World like this, Israel will no longer need the American veto at the Security Council of the United Nations but nobody wants to see the UN sink that low. The World has already said let America wallow in this hellhole by herself and they all washed their hands from this enterprise.
Now, what about Palestine? What Dershowitz seems to have difficulty grasping is that there is a difference between a war fought among two sovereign nations such as Israel and Lebanon and a war launched by a sovereign nation against a people under occupation such as Israel butchering the Palestinians. The first is called a war and the atrocities committed there are called war crimes. The second is called a one sided assault by an army against a civilian population that has no army to defend it or the means to defend itself and the atrocities committed there are called genocide.
In practical terms both Lebanon and Palestine compare poorly when measured against the military strength of Israel. However, Lebanon is still a sovereign nation and as such has options and recourses that the Palestinians do not have. The country can, for example, call on friends, on allies or the UN to help out. If worse comes to worse the country can surrender and thus invoke the protection extended to a defeated army under international conventions.
This is not what a people under occupation can do. The fight of these people is a fight to the death; their situation is literally an existential one. When Dershowitz projects comfort as he speaks of Lebanon and Palestine interchangeably, he signals that he would feel comfortable interchanging the activities of the Israelis and those of the Nazis who continued to butcher the civilian population after occupying a country.
When in his article he goes through the process of detailing how Israel went from killing the Palestinians in the ratio of one civilian for every one combatant to the ratio of one civilian for every 30 combatants, he says that Israel went through a long history of learning on the job how to butcher civilians and get away with it. But what he does not realize is that when he says Israel got 30 times better at the end of the process he is admitting that Israel was 30 times worse at the beginning of the process.
And this is where a low caliber intellect hangs himself because what is missing from his discourse is the recognition that while Israel was learning on the job, the Palestinian children were learning by osmosis as they watched helplessly while their folks were being butchered. As toddlers, these children were made to serve their apprenticeship in the Jewish slaughterhouses that slaughtered their families. They were made to watch as they grew up to become young boys and girls, then teenagers, then young men and women and finally adults. This horror went on for three long generations and is going on today.
Having no sovereign government to protect them, the children grew up to rely on themselves and on each other for protection. Having no source to learn from but the activities of the forces of occupation they learned how to destroy not to build. But having no tanks or helicopters with which to retaliate against the Israelis, they took the only alternatives available to them. It should therefore not come as a surprise that suicide bombing has replaced the throwing of stones; it was the inevitable outcome of Israel learning on the job how to butcher human beings.
And contrary to the propaganda employed under the guise of combating the so-called anti-Semitism, the evil is not the Christianity or the Islam of mankind; the evil is the Judaism of the Israelis and the Zionists who are inflicting on humanity the new plagues and the old horrors which again are reaching biblical proportions. Watch out, World because the recidivist that has raped humanity before is on the prowl again but this time he wants you to believe that the problem is with you and not with him.
Still, Dershowitz makes fantastic claims throughout the article with sayings like: "No army in history has ever had a better ratio of combatants to civilians killed in a comparable setting. Israel’s ratio is far better than that of the United States, Great Britain, Russia …"
I shall not ask the man to explain what he means by comparable setting or to give detail of operations conducted by the United States, Great Britain or Russia to allow the making of a comparison. Had he written a higher caliber article I would have been tempted to ask for such explanation. But this article is the work of an amateur who is good enough to be a Harvard law professor and nothing more; let Harvard deal with him on that score.
The reason I do not ask Dershowitz to elaborate is not only that I want to avoid having to sort out his geese from his ganders or that it is more appropriate to compare Israel with the Nazis than with the Americans, the Brits or the Russians, the reason is simpler than that. It is encapsulated in this one question: if, as he claims, Israel has introduced such improvements to better the kill ratio by 30 folds, then why did the campaign in Lebanon which came after these improvements turn out as badly as the "dark days of the Intifada?"
A con artist to the core, the man is incorrigible. He may believe that to pull a fast one on the public is part of being a good lawyer doing the best that he can for his client. But in his attempt to quantify Israel's successes at butchering people, Dershowitz has relied on the same old mentality which got him and Israel into trouble in the first place. He may think he has managed to quantify a few small successes but in reality he only managed to expose the enormous evil that lurks at the heart of the Judeo-Zionist ideology.
Rather than improve the image of Israel and earn a few kisses, Dershowitz has a better chance now at seeing himself blow kisses at a portrait of Hitler than see someone sane blow kisses at Israel's army of occupation.