What about Hama?
In a column entitled “Howled down by closed minds“, Peter Hitchens asks a anti-Israel protester where she was in February 1982, a time in which two war crimes occurred, one in Lebanon under the auspices of the Israeli occupation, and the other in Hama, Syria, and ruminates on the problem of false moral equivalence and how some people just don’t want to know.
Hitchens writes,
Was I, they inquired, arguing about the numbers?
No, I replied, certainly not. It wasn’t a question of numbers. The question was about the nature and intention of the events. Explaining ( repeatedly) that I opposed the Israeli bombing of Gaza, I asked if it wasn’t important to use powerful words such as ‘Holocaust’ only when they were justified. A systematic industrialised extermination of an ethnic group on the basis of homicidal hatred was different from a bombing attack on a city, however bad.
In a way, Peter recognized the unwashed just using evil sounding words to advance a cause that is lost to logic and facts. Sad, but this is a typical Liberal Democrat tactic.
Comment by PCD — 1/15/2009 @ 6:39 am