I do not quite understand the stuff about "Orientalist", "state-in-waiting", etc and that may be why the following questions arise in my mind:
How is Carrol's analogy inapplicable, except in terms of scale? If the US would supply Hezbollah with billions in cash and arms, they too I am sure would be happy to fly about in F-18s and carry out "precision" bombing. In the absence of any of that power (surely we are not equating Iranian support to what Israel has at its disposal and was visible during the recent war), while under a terrible attack, they (Hezbollah) took the only measures they could: lob rockets into Israel (most of which were, from what I can tell, ineffective). Carrol's analogy, it seems, is exactly to draw out the thinking: how do you differentiate between the two things being analogized and what does that differentiation amount to, in this context? What prevents us from examining that, apart from Jewish Holocaust exceptionalism?
--ravi
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