Friday, July 28, 2006

Words

Two of my favorite writers--Victor Davis Hanson and Charles Krauthammer--approach the Israel conundrum from opposite ends today. Hanson approaches the matter rhetorically:

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

“Eyewitnesses” usually aren’t, and their testimony is cited only against Israel.

“Grave concern” is used by Europeans and Arabs who privately concede there is no future for Lebanon unless Hezbollah is destroyed — and it should preferably be done by the “Zionists” who can then be easily blamed for doing it.


While Krauthammer's take is more historical:

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin.


Yes, and again yes. Krathaummer reminds us elsewhere that Jacque Chirac has stated plainly that if Paris were ever attacked, its response might well be nuclear. The double standard in currency these days is appalling.

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