Sludge Report #94 - Macho Instincts Take Over

Thursday, 5 July 2001, 3:30 pm
Column: C.D. Sludge

Sludge Report #94 - Israel’s Macho Instinct Takes Over

Inside This Edition: Israel’s Macho Instinct Takes Over – Murder Is Murder

NOTE: Authors of this report will be anonymous and wide ranging, and occasionally finely balanced. Indeed you are invited to contribute: The format is as a reporters notebook. It will be published as and when material is available. C.D. Sludge can be contacted at sludge@scoop.co.nz. The Sludge Report is available as a free email service..Click HERE - http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/myscoop/ to subscribe...

Sludge Report #94

Israel’s Macho Instinct Takes Over

If and when more teenagers are killed by another young Palestinian suicide bomber, Israel’s Cabinet will only have themselves to blame. And when they go to comfort the grieving parents of the victims, they should remember to say sorry.

It would appear decades of regarding the lives of their neighbours as being of inherently less value than those of their own people, have taken their toll on the Israeli leadership.

Faced with a gross error of judgment in allowing the Israeli military to continue to pursue its policy of extra-judicial killings during a fragile cease-fire, rather than correcting the errors of their ways, the Israeli cabinet have chosen instead to follow a knee-jerk macho response.

The helicopter attack on a car – allegedly containing Palestinian militants – on Sunday was a mistake. And the continued policy of assassination, today approved by the Israeli leadership, is wrong.

While it is often harder to apologise than it is to put on a display of bravado and just keep on doing whatever it is that you have been doing, one path carries a hope of resolving conflict. The other merely perpetuates injustice and escalates it.

Sludge would have thought that the tit-for-tat ballistic missile tests that the Israelis and the Syrians engaged in over the last week would have made the Israel aware that its continuing offensive against “Palestinian Criminals” could potentially bring them and their nation into the path of harm of entirely another scale.

Murder Is Murder

When a person takes the life of another it is called murder.

When a group of politically motivated people decide to take the lives of a group of civilians from another country it is called terrorism.

When the government of a national state orders the summary execution of people of another state it is called state sponsored terrorism.

When a government of a national state orders the summary execution of people from another state during a ceasefire!, then it is called downright stupid.

That is why the question of who deserves to die is best left up to God. Guilt, especially during war and conflict, has a very subjective quality.

While Israel considers Hamas members as cold-blooded killers and criminals. Hamas members, and many Palestinians, consider Hamas suicide bombers both soldiers and patriots.

Meanwhile a cease fire means exactly that, a cessation of firing upon the forces of the other side. It doesn’t mean not firing upon those members of the other side whom you, subjectively, consider to be legitimately free from your attack.

There is tragic irony in the fact that possibly the greatest fears faced by the Israeli people stem from state-sponsored terrorism, whether it comes from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Syria. And yet that is precisely what they are now choosing to do themselves.

Everybody in the world – without exception – is legally entitled under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not to mention normal standards of moral decency, and the Torah!) – to a fair trial before they are punished.

Without a properly conducted trial there can be no justice.

And without justice there can be no peace.

Rather than returning to their old ways, ways which demonstrably have failed to achieve anything but misery, Israel must find new methods in its quest for peace, if it is to have any home of reaching its stated objective.

As discussed in Sludge Report #89 – Turning Of Things Upside Down , it was the solely because after the June 1st bombing in Tel Aviv Israel chose not to follow its normal policy, that the June 13th cease fire was ever achieved.

Anti©opyright Sludge 2001

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Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

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