There are legitimate disagreements on the Israeli offensive in Gaza: whether it was justified, whether it has been pursued effectively, whether the civilian casualties could have been avoided, etc. What is not legitimate, though, is the deliberate choice by many, many, many here on DKos to minimize the horrendous and years-long terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians by means of missiles and mortars, attacks which have endangered both Israeli and Palestinian civilians.
There is a line between interpretation and dishonesty, and an appalling number of posts here have gone far past that line. Whether out of ignorance or genuine desire to mislead those who aren't informed, the reductio ad absurdum needs to be pointed out and called out, just as Rush Limbaugh was properly criticized for calling the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses "sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank." (I note that dhonig started writing about this in a previous diary, but focused more on the term "Ceasefire".)
Let's start with a selection of comments about Hamas' weaponry posted here since the start of the Israeli operation in Gaza. First the quantity:
[O]ne side is guilty of firing a few rockets and missing.
Then, when the Palestinians fight back by launching a few ineffective rockets...
Hamas is using a small number of shitty rockets....
Words matter, and so do numbers. How about 1 day, courtesy of Al Jazeera:
More than 30 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel on Saturday [December 20th]....
How about since 2001, as per Al Arabiya?
Since 2001, Hamas and other groups have fired about 4,100 rockets and a similar number of mortar rounds into Israel, the Israeli Foreign Ministry says. Over 1,500 rockets were fired in 2008.
"Thousands" does not equal "few," or is it a "small number," particularly when they are fired at civilian towns and cities, and particularly the vast majority of them were fired prior to the Israeli operation in Gaza. People who deny the reality of those numbers, and the threat they pose to Israelis (whose casualties are low only because they have been provided with shelters and warning systems by the Israeli government), are intentionally trying to mislead and hide the attempted mass murder of Israelis by Hamas.
The more common, and perhaps more insidious, pattern of dishonesty involves the quality and danger from those weapons. Here are just a few of the many, many comments here minimizing the missiles' range and power:
I know you are scared of 'teh Ay-rabs' and their 4 toy rockets per month over the recent "lull" but we were talking about occupation.
They are less dangerous than Chinese leaded toys, for fuck's sake.
More like firecrackers than real rockets.
They're fighting with homemade rockets with the accuracy of bottle rockets.
Instead they explode bombs in discos or fire off ineffectual rockets that are worse than useless....
A proper response to tiny rockets by criminals is police enforcement not cluster bombing villages.
The primitive rockets being fired out of Gaza is a joke compared to the IDF fire power.
Bottle rockets....
[H]opped up bottle rockets....
If Gaza was doing well, if people had hope, jobs, food, security... do you think they would wish to risk all of that by letting some nut cases fire off large bottle rockets?
Those are not WMDs. More like firecrackers or something.
Here's your firecracker:
and here:
and here (right next to a gas station):
and this by a school filled with children:
As for being "homemade," some of the missiles are assembled in Hamas workshops, true, rather than in factories. So was Timothy McVeigh's explosive in Oklahoma City. One doesn't need industry to create lethality.
With regard to accuracy, that cuts both ways. True, Hamas' missiles don't have guidance systems, but all that means is that they will hit someplace in the cities at which they are aimed. Could be a school, or a hospital, or a home, or a playground, or a backyard. They are aimable enough to hit the cities themselves, and unlike the Israeli weaponry, there are no missile launchers or mortars anywhere near those cities when Hamas fires at them.
Oh, and the "bottle rocket" thing? As dhonig wrote in the diary I cited above, bottle rockets bear no resemblance to the Hamas weapons, which carry tens of pounds of explosives and can travel up to 25 or 30 miles and hit the cities and town at which they are aimed. These aren't toys; they are murder weapons, fired by the thousands at civilians.
I am not posting this to open up a debate about the Israeli Army's tactics in Gaza, the rightness or wrongness of the occupation, white phosphorus, or any other I/P issues. Rather, I am writing because if we are going to have an honest debate about the Gaza situation, we need to be honest about what has come before, which was not a "few" "toy" "bottle rockets", but rather thousands of deadly missiles and mortars fired over years from Gaza specifically at Israeli civilians well within the pre-1967 borders. If you want to justify those acts of attempted mass murder, at least start from the truth. {ProfJonathan}