Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
and Bashar Assad of Syria
are beginning to look like evil twins (we may nickname them the Netanyassad
twins) with one being more evil than the other. And the question is this: Which
of the two deserves having the title of super-evil bestowed on him? Well, we
can devise a way to find out but it will require doing some math, so let's
leave it for later and concentrate instead on something else.
It is that Netanyahu has an arsenal of half-assed quips he
and his cohorts use all the time; one quip being this: “We use missiles to
protect the civilian population; they use the civilian population to protect
missiles.” Netanyahu utters these words to justify bombing the civilian
installations in Gaza
at which time scores of women, children, the elderly and the infirm die.
There is nothing new in this performance because this is the
Jewish way of placing the blame on the victims of their actions, especially
when they see the need to absolve themselves of the death and destruction they
heap on the innocent. It should be noted that the victims they blame are dead
people most of the time; people they would have killed themselves such as the
scores that the Netanyahu forces obliterate day in and day out.
But is there a shred of validity in their argument, and if
yes, what is it? To answer the question we must be reminded of the fact that Gaza is a small city
crammed with 1.7 million people. There is not enough space in it to use as
living quarters, and space to use as a field on which to conduct war. Moreover,
given that this is the third generation of Palestinians living in the
cross-hairs of the Jewish killing machine, everyone who can protect the family
carries a gun or another weapon on them. And these people – members of the
Hamas movement – take the weapons with them everywhere they go, including the
mosques where they pray, and the homes where they live with the family.
And so, what Netanyahu does when he blames them for what
befalls them and befalls their families is akin to the criminal who invades a
home then puts the blame for the death of the people in it on the owner of the
gun because he did not leave the weapon outside before entering. His
explanation would be that the owner made the mistake of using the gun to defend
himself and his family, something he should not have done. But he did, and this
is what forced the criminal to use his own gun to take out anything and
everything that moved in the house, says the criminal.
Likewise, because the Hamas people maintain their weapons
close to the population they protect, they give reason to the Netanyahu forces
to kill scores of women, children, the elderly and the infirm, says Netanyahu
and those who speak for him. This is valid, they say, whether or not the
fighters among the Hamas people have somewhere else to which they can go, a
place in the open where the Israeli helicopter gunships can spot them from the
air and slaughtered them without any being able to defend himself, herself or
the family. And this would be the way to protect the non-combatant Palestinian
people ... according to this manifestation of Jewish genius.
Let us now see how far that kind of logic has taken the
situation in the Middle East, both by the hands of Syria 's
Assad and the hands of Israel 's
Netanyahu. We do some math to see which is the more evil of the two. To begin, the conflict in Syria
has lasted something like 150 weeks during which time it is said that 160,000
people died. Doing the fighting were the Assad forces on one side, and a
variety of other groups on the other side; many of which turned out to be
ferocious fighters.
And so, we must assume that the Assad forces could not have
been responsible for more than half of the people that died ... which means
80,000. This brings the number of dead per week in the Syrian conflict to an
average of 533. This being the number that applies for a population of about 20
million, the number of dead per million per week comes to 27.
As to the war on