Israel Matzav

'Morally justified'

I'm tempted to put a 'flying pigs' label on this.

Professor Asa Kasher, the man who wrote the IDF 'code of ethics,' that has us sending ground troops in to be killed instead of bombing from the air and killing (often willing) human shields, says that it MIGHT - note that MIGHT - be permissible to carpet bomb some terrorist strongholds under some circumstances. As if any other civilized country would dream of doing otherwise....

"I don't know what the truth is about the circumstances," Kasher stressed. "But assuming that we warned the civilians and gave them enough time to leave, and that the civilians who remained chose, themselves, not to leave, then there is no reason to jeopardize the lives of the troops," he told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

Kasher's statements followed the deaths of nine soldiers on Wednesday, eight of whom were ambushed at Bint Jbail. Israel has been reluctant to use sufficient weaponry to flatten the Hizbullah "terrorist capital" of Bint Jbail, a policy that many have criticized as being overly sensitive toward the enemy and its civilians.

Moshe Keynan, the father of a soldier killed in another conflict, said he was angry with the IDF for jeopardizing soldiers' safety to protect civilians.

"We need to worry that our kids return to their parents and we need to worry about our family and sons and wives, not how we look on BBC," said Keynan.

Meir Indor, director-general of the Terror Victims Association, seconded Keynan's concerns.

"There is an argument which is dealing with the subject of how much danger soldiers can be exposed to in order to save civilians. I think the world already decided that you don't sacrifice your soldiers in order to save enemy civilians," said Indor, whose organization is lobbying the military and the government against putting soldiers in unnecessarily dangerous situations.

And if Hezbullah forces them to stay?

Kasher admitted that the decision to bomb a house or town was quite complicated, especially if there are citizens who wanted to leave but were prohibited from doing so by Hizbullah.

"We should take into consideration that people want to leave and aren't allowed to leave, and that changes the situation, but not on a grand scale," he said. "There you can justify certain infantry attacks... but only if it doesn't dramatically increase the jeopardy of our troops. Something which is a slightly higher level of risk is acceptable, but something drastically higher is not acceptable."

I would suggest that if 'civilians' allow rocket launchers to be installed in their homes (which is what is going on in southern Lebanon), whether they choose to stay or not is irrelevant.

I cannot think of any other country in the world that would worry so much about killing too many Hezbullah supporters. This is what we get for being led by people who have abandoned Judaism and adopted 'liberalism' as their religion.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:32 AM