On Sep 14, 2006, at 12:43 PM, ravi wrote:
> At around 14/9/06 3:06 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> On Sep 14, 2006, at 2:41 PM, ravi wrote:
>>
>>> How is Carrol's analogy inapplicable, except in terms of scale?
>>
>> In this case, scale is no minor matter, but residents of Israel, a
>> category that includes many Arabs and many people alienated from the
>> government, are not the same as the SS, are they?
>>
>
> Appreciate the response. If I am reading it correctly, the analogy is
> not so much: Hezbollah==Jews and Israel==SS, but "the relationship
> of SS
> to Jews and the action/reaction" == "what the Israelis do to
> Lebanon/Palestine/Hezbollah and their actions and Hezbollah reaction".
> So even though the analogy does not hold very well by some measures
> (the
> Jews were not a military entity; they were attacked by their own
> state;
> Israel is a democracy with some level of respect for law, human
> rights;
> etc), here, from my naive outlook, are the similarities (just off the
> top of my head):
>
> 1. Both "victims" were set upon by the aggressor (in the case of
> Israel
> starting with the occupation)
>
> 2. Significant imbalance of power in favour of the aggressor
>
> 3. Indiscriminate mass targetting (dare I say murder?) by the
> aggressor
>
> 4. Any response from the victim arises out of and is a form of
> impotence
> (in terms of power). When this came up last, I used the analogy of the
> crimes of Palestinian boys throwing rocks.
>
> I would suggest that in evaluating the analogy, it is irrelevant that
> Hezbollah has sources of money and weapons, or has a history (though I
> have found little evidence of it) of terrorist action. What is
> significant, IMHO, to the analogy is: is Hezbollah, akin to the
> Jews and
> the Palestinian boys, a weaker entity suffering aggression without
> [larger] cause, and most of all, without means to respond in a
> legitimate fashion?
>
> When you are herded into ghettos or being marched to the gas
> chamber, or
> bombed to smithereens from 10,000 feet, what can you do? Nothing. You
> flail about. You kick and scream. You throw rocks. You lob rockets.
> Hezbollah or the Palestinian boys cannot be guilty of war crimes
> because
> they are incapable of participating in a war. They can either lie down
> and take it, or throw tantrums. Much like us leftists in the USA. ;-)
>
> Now, you are smarter about these sort of things than me, so I look
> forward to seeing you punch holes in my argument!
>
> --ravi
>
>
> P.S: There is one more issue here: the definition of war crimes is
> based
> on certain institutions of which Israel is a powerful part and from
> which entities like Hezbollah are deliberately excluded, yes? Take the
> case of the businessman who was recently arrested in Florida for
> offering to provide a feed of Al-Mannar to an undercover FBI agent. By
> being declared a terrorist organisation at the outset, the
> Hezbollah are
> deprived of the means to offer their view, which might include a
> rebuttal of the accusation.
>
> P.P.S: This could be the point where Ramesh from Nepal could remind us
> that Gandhi's incoherent advice to the Jews was to march into the gas
> chambers with pride, or some such.
>
> --
> Support something better than yourself: ;-)
> PeTA: http://www.peta.org/
> GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/
> If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/
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