Nathan Newman writes, inadvisably "while it's nice to tally up deaths on each side and note that the body bags are piling up higher on the West Bank"
-If you don't mind me saying, I think your cynicism about the press-war -got the better of you here. Most people would prefer not to be tallying -up body bags at all.
Of course most would rather not be counting body bags, but when they do, they tend to assume that sympathy should go only to those who have a higher count. Those favoring the Palestinians look at raw numbers, while those favoring the Israelis concentrates on the deaths of "innocents" (using a restricted meaning of that term to keep Palestinian numbers low).
The rhetoric has moved to a point that anyone expressing sympathy for Palestinian deaths is labelled a terrorist-sympathizer while those like Sweeney who express sympathy for the deaths of Israelis at the hands of suicide bombers get treated like apologists for Occcupation.
I do tend to have a cynical view on war-- the point is to kill the other side until they submit to demands, so there is rarely ever much edifying in the discussion about relative barbarism. For the people dying, they have suffered the ultimate barbarism, so everything else is just details. It's all a distraction from real discussions on just solutions and merits of the objectives of either side.
-- Nathan Newman