On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.
Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over 7 pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.
As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back. Nour was thrown backward as the room filled with dust. She could not see through the smoke, but she could hear the woman’s voice shouting: “Aiman!”
Do you think it’s a bad thing the West is letting Hezbollah get away with attacking civilians in Israel? Or is it a good thing?
Fun fact! You can decry senseless violence from one source while not excusing it from another! Criticism of Israel’s tactics should never be taken as endorsement of terrorism perpetrated by Hezbollah (or Hamas, etc.), just as criticism of the tactics of Hezbollah (or Hamas, etc.) should never be taken as endorsement of terrorism perpetrated by Israel!
So do you decry senseless violence from Hamas and Hezbollah or are all you complaints one sided.
The whole place is a shit show. Has been for years, centuries, millennia.
So do you decry senseless violence from Hamas and Hezbollah or are all you complaints one sided.
Wow, your reading comprehension is as bad as Senator John Kennedy’s hearing.
Of course I decry senseless violence from Hamas and Hezbollah. And I would oppose sending weapons to them.
A funnier fact! The poster I replied to wasn’t ‘criticizing Israel’s tactics’ - they were questioning why ‘the West’ allowed Israel to attack Hezbollah.
Take your ‘both sides are bad in this conflict’ to heart and read their comment again
The poster I replied to wasn’t ‘criticizing Israel’s tactics’ - they were questioning why ‘the West’ allowed Israel to attack Hezbollah.
No they weren’t. They asked why the West was letting Israel get away with so much. Then listed various examples of things that are causing widespread harm to civilians.
Then YOU asked if they think it’s bad that the West is letting Hezbollah get away with attacking civilians in Israel.
But your question begins from a false premise. Basically no government in the West provides aid or weapons to Hezbollah. They are considered a terrorist organization by the West. So the West is not letting Hezbollah get away with it.
Meanwhile the West continues to provide weapons to Israel, who is using those weapons to cause significant harm to civilian populations.
That’s the question. Why is the West letting Israel attack civilians without repercussion? There’s no reason in good faith to ask someone who asks this question about how they feel about Hezbollah attacking civilians. Because, ostensibly, they are opposed to violence against civilians. As, clearly, is the West when it’s not Israel (or, indeed, the West) perpetrating the violence.
(I think the obvious answer to the question is “because Israel is allied with the West and in realpolitik we let our allies do horrible things that we would not tolerate in our enemies.” That’s not an ethical answer, many of Israel’s actions lately have been horrific, but it’s the realistic one.)
Edit: grammatical fix