Proportionate?

Jock — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 21:23:00 +0000

There was a table in The Times on Wednesday showing "Israel's Tally" in the latest bout of middle east warfare. Bearing in mind we are told incessantly by the pro-Israel lobby that they are merely responding to being fired on and so on it's quite a shock really:

ISRAEL’S TALLY
In 14 days:

4 villages captured by Israel
40,000 shells have been fired
2,750 rockets and mortar fired into Israel
17 civilians killed
24 soldiers killed
381 Lebanese killed
75 soldiers injured

I did some searching about these "Katyusha" rockets. They can apparently manage a warhead of about 20 kg compared with motorized artillery (175mm/8in) whose projectiles are more usually 60kg.

Now, I would not want to live under either sort of fire, but if I had to choose I would take my chances facing 55 tonnes of projectile (assuming that most of that 2,750 projectiles are forty pound rockets and not ten pound mortars) spread across northern Israel than 2400 tonnes of missile fired into Lebanon.

So, even if you don't regard the human rights abuse of terrorising a whole nation as disproportionate, just on tonnage of weaponry fired, they are two orders of magnitude "disproportionate".

A fight ostensibly over two kidnapped soldiers has already resulted in three dozen or so Israeli families grieving for loved ones and an order of magnitude more than that Lebanese families grieving.

Stop defending this humanitarian disgrace!

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Proportionate?