[...] the number of people Israel killed is not only almost 10 times higher than the number of people Hezbollah killed, but the number of soldiers Hezbollah killed is three times higher than the number of Israeli civilians they killed, while the number of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel is about three times the number of Hezbollah fighters. So whose arms are purer? A journalist from The Guardian who is currently in Israel was shocked to hear that these figures have not been the subject of public discussion here.
What utter nonsense!
Where and when in history has the morality of a side been defined by the relative number of kills? This logic doesn't make sense, both at the individual and at the nation-state level.
Let's say a woman is assaulted by two men who start to rip off her clothes. She, in retaliation, takes out her handgun and shoots them both. They end up dead.
Number of rape victims who were killed: Zero.
Number of room-temperature rapists: Two.
Does that accrue some magical morality to the potential rapists?
Take the case of Japan in WWII. More than 1.5 million Japanese were killed in the Pacific War between 1942-45. The Americans in stark contrast lost less than 10% of that amount.
So whose arms were purer?
According to The Theory of Moral Mathematics, the Japanese were bursting with moral superiority!
There you go, I've publicly discussed just how stupid this whole talk of morality by numbers really is.
2 comments:
I've always questioned numbers and figures and studies. All should be taken tongue in cheek since the vast majority of those who make statments like the one you pointed out here don't have a clue as to what scientific evidence they used to get those numbers and/or statistics.
Any such figures, especially those that erupt from questionable Middle-Easterners, match exactly the same title as you have here - Pure Poppycock.
Schroedinger,
you do not get what the writer of the article is saying.
The Israelis used to abide by "purity of arms" the idea that they had to hit enemy soldiers and fighters and avoiding to hit civilians.
This value was instilled in the IDF by Moshe Dayan in 1954. The 101 batallion under Sharon was counter raiding Arab bases that were used as jump off points to hit Israeli territory. In these raids many Arab villagers got killed.
After Sharon started to hit (almost) only soldiers and fighters the moral of the Israeli Army JUMPED up.
The ratio the journalist is talking about, is the ratio between civilians killed and fighters killed. This time Israel killed 1000 civilians for 300 fighters. Obviously they have given up on "purity of arms".
OTOH Hizbollah has been hitting very few Israeli civilians despite their indiscriminate rocket strikes on the North. And they have killed 60 Israeli soldiers.
Your comparison between the Jap and US WO2 losses therefore misses the point.
The Israelis are making a mistake that the West seems to keep making. Substituting the machinery of firepower for close up fighters with good intelligence (HUMINT not SIGINT). The idea behind it is that victory has to be cheap in lifes. Already in the late 90ies Israeli intelligence lost their operatives in South Lebanon, as they were uncovered and killed by Hezbollah. The Israelis never managed to replace them, so they had been blind for nearly 10 years when they started this campaign.
The leadership of Western States and armies is lacking in balls. They keep hanging on to the same assumptions and keep making the same mistakes. Consequently we keep on losing conflicts. This will not stop until we take a cold, hard look at our record and correct it. That may be painful as hell, but it is unavoidable, just for survival, not even for victory.
BTW, the end of this guy Gideon Levy's article is utterly illusory. He thinks there will be peace through negotiations. Basically, in the West we got a choice between a Left that just
wants to surrender and a Right that does not really want to carry the burden of warfare.
It is both vomit.
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