In Pakistan, one human rights group estimates that 1,000 women are murdered in honor killings by their families every year. In Nigeria, Islamic militants have killed more than 1,500 people in 2014, according to Amnesty International. And the death toll from the slaughter in Syria—just spitting distance from Israel—adds up to a robust 191,000. But the world—or at least the world as personified by the British law professor with his fondness for exaggeration—doesn’t pay a lot of attention to these Muslim but non-Palestinian corpses. Nope: you’ve got to be a dead person in Gaza or Hebron to claim the world’s sympathy. Merely being an Arab, or a Muslim, doesn’t cut the mustard, because when Muslims are murdering other Muslims—like more than 2,400 Iraqis killed by other Iraqis in June of this year. The civilized world, or at least the chattering classes, does little more than shrug.

Instead, from the Telegram we get this “Gaza conflict ‘causing PTSD in children’ after seeing dead bodies and witnessing heavy shelling.” From the Times: “UN demands halt to Gaza incursion as tanks smash hospital.” A simple Google search will net you hundreds of like-minded headlines. By the way, guess how many citizens were killed during the second half of last year in Egypt? According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 3,143.

But it’s more satisfying to focus on Israel, that miniscule sliver of desert with an equally miniscule population (some 6 million Jews and 1.7 million primarily Muslim Arabs), hemmed in on one side by hostile Arab countries whose Muslim populations add up to a healthy 320 million, give or take, and the other by the Mediterranean Sea. Because Israel isn’t just any other imperfect Democracy, with a host of domestic and international problems of its own. Oh no. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re talking a whole country filled primarily with Jews. So the whole place is only as big as the State of New Jersey, while the rest of the Middle East is about the size of 90 percent of the contiguous United States? So what?

Why is it so hard for the world to wake up to its blindness and see that once again it’s easier to focus on the moral shortcomings, real or imagined, of Jews, than to grapple with actual slaughter? From the point of view of the Muslim nations, I get it: let Israel take the heat for the crappy conditions and even worse governance under which vast numbers of Muslims live. Easier to blame Jews than to run your own country with a modicum of basic human decency.

I’m not suggesting that Muslim lives are worth less than Jewish ones. Nor that the mainly Arab occupants of Gaza and the West Bank don’t have legitimate grievances, including—especially—the deaths, mainly from aerial bombing, of citizens. Merely that the magnitude of Palestinian loss, when looked at through the lens of numbers alone, pales compared to that suffered by their co-religionists.

Put another way: what if Israel were a self-professed Maronite country? A country of mainly secular Protestants and lapsed Catholics—or a majority-Arab democracy? Would anyone give a rat’s ass if it used armed force against a terrorist group whose raison d’etre is the destruction of their country and the murder of its citizens?

It’s not just in left-leaning Europe that the anti-Jewish rhetoric is getting louder. Here in America, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), calling for self-determination of Palestinians while denying the right to self-determination for Jews, has offshoots on more than eighty campuses. And in New Haven, here’s what The Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, the (recently resigned) Episcopal chaplain at Yale University, wrote in a letter to the editor that was recently published in The New York Times: “As hope for a two-state solution fades and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” In other words, recent anti-Semitic violence in Europe, notably Paris, is the fault of Jewish moral failings. In other words: Jews deserve it. And what, after all, did the Jewish State of Israel do? It went after the terror tunnels. It said no to the bombing of its civilians. It said that they meant it when they said “never again.”

Sadly I'm in the middle of dinner and am having an otherwise enjoyable evening, and just lack the time to dissect this drivel as it deserves.

Anyone else want to be tagged in for the job?

and clean the kitchen after making a great meal. I might get to it after I brush the cat and paint my toenails.

Only so much time in a day to devote to important things. Oh wait, I think I need to change the air conditioner filter and clean the grout. *checks phone*.

I'll schedule that in for September 31, 2 pm.

It's not like the OP will notice one way or another.

both seem to do, that or attempt to distract and finger point so speaking for myself here I'm starting when will the titles reflect the article they go with, when will the 'apologizing' disguised as finger pointing and but see they're worse actually be over and done with?

Regular as clockwork.

Will always want to support the decisions the son made-especially when that son willingly puts himself in danger via joining a military.

Of course she won't criticize Israel. I doubt she ever apologized for anything Israel did.

In case anyone's interested, here's the Amnesty International investigation of 2002 Jenin, which details war crimes including unlawful killings, use of human shields, and denial of humanitarian aid.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/143/2002/en/c79afe78-d7bc-11dd-b4cd-01eb52042454/mde151432002en.html

For example:

....despite all the overwhelming evidence throughout the years. They've claimed "no evidence exists" for the past decade. They're absolute jokes on I/P.

Who gives a shit what they say?

than Amnesty International. I'm sure those children that Amnesty reported by name that were killed, Amnesty was just making that up.

I hope you keep pushing this talking point. It's a great illustration of the absurd lengths of denial that you have to go to in order to maintain your worldview.

Amnesty is full of shit, defending fascist terrorists who cynically use human shields.

You can keep ignoring/denying the evidence, but that says more about yourself than anything else. Gazans are literally crying out for help against Hamas and Amnesty won't do a damned thing to advocate for them.

I'll get my facts from detailed investigations by world's most respected human rights organizations, you can stick to John Bolton and some random woman who's never even been to Gaza.

I linked to at least half a dozen other links (not rightwing) that report the same story. You're ignoring all of them in your blind devotion to an Israel-bashing source that you cannot criticize, no matter the amount of evidence provided.

As I've said many times before, I, along with Amnesty, HRW, and the rest of the reality-based community recognize that both sides have violated international humanitarian law in this conflict on many occasions. The reason you like the right-wing sources so much is because they ignore Israel's crimes.

For example, the woman in this OP claiming that "50 gunmen" were killed, omitting the fact that civilians and children were also killed, and the rest of the war crimes evidenced by Amnesty and others.

...why do Amnesty and HRW feel they have to deny the human-shielding accusation.

You can't blame me for ignoring Amnesty and HRW when they defend Palestinian human-shielding. I know why they do this, but I'm asking you for your opinion as to why they do it. Acknowledging that Hamas forces Gazans to be human shields is bad because.......?

What do you think?

including endangering civilians by conducting operations and storing munitions in civilian areas. So to say they are defending human shielding is ridiculous. They investigate war crimes extensively, much more so than the right-wing think tanks where you get your information.

You would like to believe that all Israeli atrocities are justified and it's all Hamas's fault "because human shields." This is not true, and human rights groups won't tell you what you want to hear, so you go to the right-wingers instead.

We've already been over this before. Do we really need to do it again?

You know this but you don't care. In that thread about Hamas war crimes, there are at least 6 other articles/videos corroborating Mudar Zahran's interviews with Gazans. You'd rather ignore all that and accuse me of only using rightwing sources.

How utterly disingenuous, but hardly surprising. Lies and ad hominem is about all you really have.

Your blind devotion to these Israel bashing groups makes it impossible for you to criticize them for anything. As much as you accuse your opponents of blind devotion to Israel and being against any criticism of Israel, you show you're describing yourself when you make such accusations.

There are PLENTY more crimes HRW and Amnesty have ignored like:

-Using ambulances for military purposes
-Using children in combat roles
-Misfired rockets hit their own people
-Using a hospital to shield themselves from military attack

They ignore these for the same reason they ignore human-shielding. If they were to acknowledge all these crimes rather than downplaying or denying them, this would be bad because ___________? Looks like you know the answer:

I tend to lend credence to extensive investigations by impartial groups that are dedicated and respected throughout the world for their work on human rights. You take the word of the Israeli government and right-wing think tanks, which unsurprisingly ignore and attempt to exonerate IDF's role in the atrocities they commit.

And, in order to keep believing what the Israeli government says, you also have to come up with this strange conspiracy theory that the worlds leading human rights groups are all somehow "biased" against Israel, even though there is no plausible motivation for them to do so -- if anything their biases would be pro-Israel, since orgs like HRW and Amnesty are Western in their orientation, much closer to Israel than to Palestine (Ken Roth is Jewish, for example). Nevertheless, I believe they've done a good job in remaining unbiased and holding both sides to account for their transgressions. As you know, Israel is engaged in a full-time propaganda and political pressure offensive, trying to prevent groups like HRW and Amnesty from doing their jobs and trying to affect the outcome of their investigations in various ways.

If you want to see what the result of an extensive and detailed investigation looks like, here's an example. If you read it, you'll find that both Israel and Hamas are found to have violated humanitarian law.
http://www.amnesty.org/ar/library/asset/MDE15/015/2009/en/8f299083-9a74-4853-860f-0563725e633a/mde150152009en.pdf

As you know, the most recent events in Gaza have not been fully investigated yet, so obviously neither of us know how they are going to turn out. However, I'm sure you agree that it's wise to wait until all the evidence is compiled by competent experts like those at HRW and Amnesty rather than sporadic anecdotes that filter their way up to the right-wing media. This goes both ways, btw: there were various reports of a "Jenin Massacre" in the event referenced by the OP, but after detailed investigation, Amnesty HRW and others found that there wasn't a large scale massacre, although war crimes were definitely committed.

BTW, are you still denying that children were killed in Jenin? Or are you standing by the OP's claims that all the Palestinians killed were gunmen. And if you don't deny that children were killed, why post an OP by someone who you know is lying?

are minimizing Israeli war crimes. For example, despite the fact that Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai as said the “goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages" (referring to 2012), or that Gilad Sharon has said that "we need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.” Despite these statements that indicate an intent to commit genocide, HRW and Amnesty have not accused Israel of intentionally killing civilians, instead using more equivocal language:

and yes Gazans are crying out for help -with rebuilding, with ending the blockade which has rendered their lives hopeless ending IDF/ShinBet blackmailing/abusing those seeking medical treatment outside of Gaza. HRW and Amnesty, and B'tselem have all spoken out on these issues which 'some here' seem to pretend do not exist or perhaps outright ignore