6/15/2003: Palestinians swarm for body parts

[rumi]

<i>Lemme ask you this: when was the last time you heard of an Israeli woman suicide bomber?</i>

When was the last time you heard of a Palestinian Apache helicopter strike killing 9 children? A Palestinian tank running over disabled, elderly Israelis in their homes? A Palestinian F16 firing into the Knesset?

One of the reasons there are suicide bombers is the grim fact that they very few ways of attacking their enemy. If our tax dollars paid for tanks, missiles, bombs, bulldozers, fighter jets etc. for the Palestinians, then the suicide bombers would surely use those instead of their primitive explosives, and save their own lives in the process.

Similarly, it's unfair to say Palestinians are worse because they shoot 5 year olds in the head while Israelis kill innocents only incidentally. (By the way, I think anyone who shoots a child -- Palestininian or Israeli -- is just evil.)

-The Israelis kill a lot of children, and intentionally, with their tanks and rubber coated bullets. That's a well-documented fact, and one of the reasons the Israelis don't want an international force there to monitor crimes and keep the peace in the occupied territories.
-The majority (or at least a very significant minority) of Palestinian casualties are children. The stats show that is the Palestinian kids who are dying, much more so than the Israelis... by a factor of 7 to 1 or something like that.
-In our legal system, there is no difference between killing someone intentionally and killing someone unintentionally while trying to kill someone else, if you know that there is a likelyhood that innocents will die.

You can't say the Israelis are better or more humane at all. They are simply better equipped to kill with more efficiency.

We should simply stop equipping them... and insist that they do the right thing. The violence will disappear naturally, because the root cause --the occupation-- will be gone.