Moron.

Native American Genocide. Never Again.

So Israel invades Gaza and the world thinks they’re overreacting, that they are employing a disproportionate response to the Hamas rockets. Which begs the question, what would have been a proportionate response?

When the Allies fought Hitler, they bombed Germany’s cities indiscriminately, nearly every night for years, seeking to inflict the maximum number of casualties, nearly all of whom were civilians. In Dresden and Hamburg, which they bombed toward the end of the war when it was already clear that Germany was toast, they killed more than half a million civilians in just a few evenings. Truman, of course, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killings about 350,000.

Uh..

Fortunately, even now, even as Israel has entered Gaza on the ground and even after the bombing of the UN school today, I believe that Israel continues to seek to minimize civilian casualties.

A couple of days ago, however, they killed a Hamas leader in his home, with his family. I think that raises serious questions, but I suspect that attack was to teach the other Hamas leaders they needed to flee and to stay away from their families during this incursion. If that wasn’t the goal, Israel needs to evaluate carefully whether it was justified in attacking his home with everybody in it.

And would that there had been more outrage about the bombing of German cities, a gravely immoral policy that did not result in German surrender or ruin the economy or arms production (as Albert Speer related after the war).

This from a BBC website:

“[I]n February 1942, [UK] Bomber Command was instructed to shift the focus onto the ‘morale of the enemy civil population’. This new policy came to be called ‘area bombing’.

“The aiming points thereafter, for bombing raids, were no longer military or industrial installations, but a church or other significant spot in the centre of industrial towns. And since fire was found to be the most effective means of destroying a town, the bombers now carried mainly incendiary bombs.

“Thus, the exigencies of war had rendered the traditional distinction between combatants and non-combatants meaningless. Nearly everybody living in an ‘industrial town’ was considered to contribute directly or indirectly to the German war effort, and had therefore become a supposedly legitimate target.

“A few weeks before the end of World War Two, Winston Churchill drafted a memorandum to the British Chiefs of Staff:

‘It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’

“More than half a century later, the strategic bombing campaign continues to nag the national conscience. Some historians go as far as to suggest that by bombing cities the British ‘descended to the enemy’s level’ (John Keegan). This is, of course, an exaggeration. The bombing of Dresden cannot be equalled with the horrors of Auschwitz.

“Many felt that the Germans deserved to reap the whirlwind they had sown. Yet Bomber Command’s policy of targeting residential areas clearly contradicted Chamberlain’s pre-war statement in parliament that it was ‘against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks on the civilian population’. How could a nation so proud of its high moral standards drop bombs on women and children?

“The history of the British bombing campaign in World War Two shows us how easily war can erode moral standards. In the first months of the war, Bomber Command was anxious to avoid the risk of killing civilians, and constrained itself to leaflet dropping and attacks on naval targets. But after Dunkirk, the heavy bombers remained the only means by which Britain could fight the Nazis in continental Europe.”

Israel and its supporters should think twice about justifying the Gaza campaign on this basis.