Friday, August 18, 2006
To the Editor
This letter just sent off in response to this article in The Nation:
The Nation makes the same pro-Israel mistake as one frequently finds in the corporate media when it writes ["Crisis in Lebanon," Aug. 28/Sept 4 issue] "Hezbollah has fired several thousand rockets into northern Israel, killing about 100" (the article was written before the shooting ended). While Hezbollah did kill 158 Israelis, only 41 of those were killed by rockets fired into northern Israel; three-quarters of them were Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon (or on the border).
By way of contrast, of the 1300+ Lebanese killed by Israel using primarily precision weaponry, the vast majority were civilians, with a signficant fraction of those being children under the age of twelve. The Nation attributes this "in large part [to] Israel's greater power," but it actually has a lot more to do with Israel's indiscriminate (and criminal) choice of targets than it does their power per se.
