[lit-ideas] Re: Jihad Against Hezbollah
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2006 13:45:29 -0700 (PDT)
--- Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ursula:
>
> > U: I've never said this. You're putting words in
> my mouth and ignoring
> > the context of the words you're intentionally or
> unintentionally
> > muddling. I said that all Resistance fighters
> attack and then melt back
> > into the population. That's not the same thing
> as all combatants and
> > not the same thing as hiding behind civilians.
>
> This is too simplistic to be disentangled briefly,
> if it can be
> disentangled at all: take the Vietcong; they very
> often 'melted back
> into the population,' but they were also organized
> into military units
> (divisions, brigades, etc.) and they were not
> 'resistance fighters' in
> the same sense that the French Resistance was; they
> were invaders.
> 'Melting back into the [non-combatant] population'
> is simply a euphemism
> for hiding behind non-combatants, where the fact
> that they have done so
> is no secret to the other side, in this particular
> case, the Israelis.
*Perhaps we could go back to WWII. Did the British
immediately evacuate London when it became clear that
the Germans would be bombing it ? Did the Soviet
troops never place themselves in the vicinity of
civilians in Leningrad and Stalingrad ?
The Hezbollah is a militia with a few thousand
fighters, no air force or tank forces. It's hardly
realistic to expect it to stand face to face to the
world's third army in the open field and let itself be
destroyed for the promise of virgins in heaven.
As to your comments about the discussion: I agree with
the caveat that one side here seems rather more
scrupulous about corroborating factual claims than the
other. Eric writes: " I am appalled at the inhumanity
of those who consider situating civilians in military
targets to be an acceptable
tactic." As far as I know, there is no evidence of
Hezbollah deliberately 'situating civilians in
military targets'. There is a lot of hear-say, mostly
based on Israeli statements, about them placing their
fighters in the vicinity of civilians, and I assume
that there will be some truth to that for the reasons
stated above. Nevertheless, several articles were
posted here making the point that there is no evidence
that this is what actually happened at Qana or in
several other cases of civilian targets being hit, and
that it is contradicted by the statements of the
survivors as well as by the fact that there were no
Hezbollah casulaties on the sites. One might expect
the people who continue to make these claims to
present some hard evidence. Admittedly, it would
probably not change my basic views on the conflict,
but it might change my view of them.
O.K.
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