Having One's Cake and Eating It Too

I would just like to pause here and point out the hypocrisy of Israel's behavior.

Israel cannot on the one hand take billions and billions of US dollars to build a huge military capacity, brag about it, consistently behave in ways to inflict horrific abuse on the Palestinians, and in its spare time provoke its Arab neighbors with extra-curricular warmongering activity and political assassinations, while on the other hand whining about being a poor, little picked-upon isolated country who everyone hates and whose citizens are suffering and threatened.

Here's a website devoted to innocent Israeli and Palestinian children killed in this conflict since 2000. Statistics through 2/1/08 are as follows: Israeli children killed: 119; Palestinian children killed: 982. The numbers don't lie.

Hebrew media reported that Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told her American counterpart Condoleezza Rice during their last meeting in Washington that Israel is preparing to wage a large-scale military operation against the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Ma'ariv newspaper's website quoted Israeli sources that attended the meeting as saying that Livni confirmed to Rice that the Israeli government is studying the efficiency of the economic sanctions and pressures it imposed on Gaza before waging a military land operation.

In another context, the information office of the Nafha society for the defense of prisoners and human rights stated the IOF troops killed during only two weeks in February 38 Palestinians including six children and one woman 75 percent of them were killed in the Gaza Strip.

In a statement received by the PIC, the society added that the Israeli artillery and air raids killed last January 11 Palestinian women and 11 children in Gaza alone.

In another development, the health ministry in Gaza warned that the ambulance and emergency services stopped completely due to an acute shortage of fuel in light of the frequent Israeli attacks against the Strip and the increasing Palestinian casualties needed to be transferred to Gaza hospitals.

Again, Israel punishes the civilian population of Gaza in violation of international law. What on earth does Livni mean when she says that the Israeli government is "studying the efficiency of the economic sanctions and pressures" it has imposed on Gaza? Excuse me? Has Gaza become a laboratory? Here's a tip: the economic sanctions and pressures cause death, including the death of innocent children. So what's to study here, exactly? Ways to get more faster better death??

You know, when people can look on the suffering of other human beings with such cold detachment, something important in the human condition has been irretrievably lost. This attitude is the same attitude witnessed this week in the people kicking and abusing sick cows: an utter disregard for life, a bloodthirsty, vengeful lust for power over the weak. Gratuitous cruelty. In a word: evil.

None of which is to say anything about the suffering caused by and on behalf of the US. Indeed, innocent blood literally drenches the earth.