Will the West learn from Libya?
On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the Gadhafi regime is 'eager to show' that foreign airstrikes are killing civilians in Libya.On Sunday at 5:00 am, Israel Radio reported that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that American intelligence had caught the Libyans trying to plant dead bodies of civilians where the strikes took place.
US intelligence reports suggest that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces have placed the bodies of people they have killed at the sites of coalition air strikes so they can blame the West for the deaths, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in a television interview on Saturday.Gee, do you think regimes that use their own civilians as human shields would do something like that? Maybe Gates ought to be asked whether he thinks that other Arab Muslim tyrannies - like Hamas in Gaza - might behave in the same way. Or perhaps it could be suggested to Gates that the US clear its name later on by allowing Richie Richie Goldstone in to investigate. Maybe the Russians - who have condemned the allied strikes on Libya - could provide a member of the new Goldstone team. After all, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
"We do have a lot of intelligence reporting about Gaddafi taking the bodies of the people he's killed and putting them at the sites where we've attacked," Gates said according to interview excerpts released by CBS News' "Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer" program, which will air on Sunday.
Labels: civilian casualties, human shields, Libyan regime change
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:24 PM
2 Comments:
Tom Friedman did point out of a couple of days ago, he forgot to add Israel to the list of the exceptions, that most Middle Eastern countries are artificial states composed of hostile tribes held together by nothing by brutal force. There is no true sense of national identity in them.
There's Qaddafi's tribe in Libya, the Hashemites in Jordan, the Assads in Syria, the Sauds in Arabia and the Khalifas in Bahrain. Those outside the tribe are the perpetual outsiders. Democracy is not a concept applicable to such societies because if the leading tribe loses its dominant position, it faces being massacred.
That is a notion hard for Westerners and Israelis to grasp - that the Middle East is very much father against son, son against brother, brother against cousin and all against the outsider. That is the way too, the society of the biblical Jews were structured. The idea of the modern nation-state is a recent historical phenomenon.
In some parts of the world, a way of life that has persisted for millenia refuses to change even if modern conventions, like a humpback on a disfigured man, are applied to such societies. The Arab World, then is a collection of feuding tribes put under a flag of convenience. This is the key to understanding why the Arabs have not be able to coalesce as a civilizational force since their heyday in the 7th Century.
Except that jews had or were at least in the process of learning the ultimate morality so they would no longer continue to be that way. Others are still missing god's moral code. (mosaic law)
It has very little to do with whether the nation state is a recent historical construct or not.
Jews have morality the others do not and will continue to base their identities on all the wrong things. thank you.
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