Tag Archives: war in Israel

Telling It Like It Is

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On Wednesday, The Hill posted an article that included a few rather blunt comments from Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana.

The article reports:

Republican Sen. John Kennedy (La.) dug into President Biden’s foreign policy on Iran on Tuesday, claiming he would “take away” the president’s car keys if he were his son.

“When I look at President Biden in terms of his international affairs, national security and his domestic policy over the last two years and change — if it were my father, I’d take away his car keys, much less … the entire country, and I think … that’s what most Americans are thinking right now,” Kennedy said in an interview on Fox Business’s “The Bottom Line.”

The Senator also noted:

“President Trump put tough, tough sanctions on Iran, so it couldn’t export its oil,” Kennedy said. “Those sanctions are still there, but President Biden hasn’t enforced them. So now, instead of … producing and exporting 500,000 barrels a day, Iran is exporting 1.4 million a day, and its foreign reserves have doubled. We had Iran down, and we were choking them economically.”

“President Biden, because he thought if he was a nice guy, Iran would cooperate in terms of its nuclear weapons — he let them up, and on top of that, he gave them … tried to give them $6 billion cash,” Kennedy continued, in reference to Biden’s prisoner swap with Iran last month that allowed for the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.

The war in Israel would end quickly if the economic sanctions were put back on Iran and the aid to Gaza was stopped. The actions of America and the European Union are funding this war. The war in Ukraine could be stopped with American energy independence. All we need to do is drop the cost of oil so that Russia cannot afford to continue to war with Ukraine. Unfortunately too many people make too much money during a war, and those people make massive campaign donations.

Avoiding Moral Equivalency

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On Thursday, The Washington Examiner posted an article cautioning Americans to beware of moral equivalency in the war between Israel and Hamas.

The article notes:

Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza is brutal and devastating, and some very large X, formerly Twitter, accounts are saying that hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed. This is awful, and if true, it’s tempting to lump Israel’s killing of Palestinian women and children into the same category of evil as Hamas’s killing of Israeli women and children on Saturday. But that would be a grave moral error.

At the same time, some of Israel’s defenders make a different moral error. They point to the depravity and evil of Hamas’s terrorist attacks and the wanton murder and rape of Israeli innocents and suggest that Israel is justified to use any means it wants to eliminate Hamas or at least its ability to kill Israeli Jews. This view ignores crucial moral distinctions.

The first moral distinction is about intention. Hamas planned its invasion so as to kill as many defenseless Israeli civilians as possible. It stormed a music festival to kill everyone there and sent death squads into kibbutzim. This was the deliberate murder of innocents, including children, which is evil beyond words. Hamas’s slaughter of Jewish children is made more evil by the ethnic animus behind it and the presumed intention to spark a broader war in the Middle East.

To the extent that the Israeli bombing of Gaza kills Palestinian children, it’s a different sort of evil, and very likely a defensible, necessary evil. (I’m writing in generalities because we don’t have many confirmed reports on Israel’s tactics and strategies.) If you bomb the location of a terrorist cell or rocket depot, but your bombs also kill civilians, that is not deliberate targeting of civilians, it is collateral damage — a regrettable, anticipated, but unintended consequence of necessary military actions.

Israel does not have a duty to avoid all collateral damage. It would be impossible to reduce Gaza civilian deaths to zero, given that Hamas is known to put military resources in schools and hospitals.

Expect the media to make a big deal out of civilian deaths in Gaza. However, the Israeli Defense Forces have warned civilians to leave targeted areas. Hamas has prevented them from leaving. The difference is seeing civilian casualties as the high cost of war and seeing civilian casualties as useful propaganda tools. It should also be noted that Gaza has never built civilian bomb shelters. Israel has them throughout the country. That is the difference in the attitudes of the leaders of the two countries.