Alan M. Dershowitz: Israel, Hamas, and moral idiocy (Good overview)

The Christian Science Monitor ^ | December 31, 2008 | Alan M. Dershowitz

[2ndDivisionVet]

Cambridge, Mass. - Israel's decision to take military action against Hamas rocket attacks targeting its civilian population has been long in coming. I vividly recall a visit my wife and I took to the Israeli city of Sderot on March 20 of this year. Over the past four years, Palestinian terrorists – in particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad – have fired more than 2,000 rockets at this civilian area, which is home to mostly poor and working-class people.

The rockets are designed exclusively to maximize civilian deaths, and some have barely missed schoolyards, kindergartens, hospitals, and school buses. But others hit their targets, killing more than a dozen civilians since 2001, including in February 2008 a father of four who had been studying at the local university. These anticivilian rockets have also injured and traumatized countless children.

The residents of Sderot were demanding that their nation take action to protect them. But Israel's postoccupation military options were limited, since Hamas deliberately fires its deadly rockets from densely populated urban areas, and the Israeli army has a strict policy of trying to avoid civilian casualties.

The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.

[iowamark]

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School. His latest book is "The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace."

[Reaganesque]

The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies...

So has the Left. Cries of racism, sexism, homophobia and so on plus the alleged threat of Global Warming and myriad other issues that the Left claims to be concerned about are all dependent upon the rest of us living up to our morality. Terrorists and the Left hold us to a standard of perfection when it comes to our morality and when we are seen to violate those morals (whether we have or haven't) they denounce us as hypocrites and oppressors. Their actions aren't relevant. Only ours.

Gotta wonder, though (fair or unfair), just who learned this tactic from whom?