Return of the Cycle of Violence

By
Omri Ceren
– November 4, 2006Posted in: United Nations

Coming back for yet another extended showing, it’s our old friend and crowd favorite, the cycle of violence:

The armed wings of Fatah and Islamic Jihad have threatened to renew suicide attacks in Israel if the IDF did not halt operations in the Gaza Strip within 48 hours. At a press conference Saturday, the Al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades, Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees promised to “act with all [their] strength” to curb the IDF’s incursions. The IDF continued to operate intensively in Gaza Saturday, killing at least five armed operatives in various actions. Two Hamas members were killed in an airstrike in the northern Jebalya neighborhood Saturday afternoon, Army Radio reported. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas asked the United Nations Saturday to address what he called “Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip.”

So the Palestinians spend the better part of three months constantly firing rockets into Israeli population centers: (two most recent MR posts: here and here; Technorati link here).

Israel goes in to root out the rocket cells firing at their civilians.

The Palestinians respond by intentionally getting civilians on both sides of the conflict killed: using their own civilians as human shields and now threatening to commit suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

It must be a cycle of violence!

Except for the messy part where one side is targeting civilians and the other side isn’t. But don’t let that part get in the way of unthinking, unblinking, and frankly very, very stupid moral equivocation.

Previously:
Egregiously Stupid “Cycle of Violence” Headline of the Day, Words Are Funny Things, In Just Seven Short Paragraphs, Jimmy Carter Tells 2 Lies, Makes 2 Incoherent Arguments, Takes an Anti-Israel Stance that the State Department Mocks, and Just Generally Annoys the Hell Out of Us

UPDATE: Score:

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, delivered water, food and other basic assistance into the town, with its Gaza director, John Ging, saying the situation inside the town was “desperate”. “Death, destruction and despair are the terms to describe the situation,” Ging told reporters afterward. “The situation is very grim. The civilian population is living in a very difficult situation. There is shortage of food, of water, there is destruction and devastation everywhere… The entire population is now living in fear, it’s extremely dangerous… We have to make an appeal to end the violence because the cycle of violence results in innocent civilians paying the price, often with their lives,” he said.

Let’s review: innocent Israeli civilians “pay the price” when Palestinian terrorists blow themselves up in cafes. Innocent Palestinian civilians “pay the price” when Palestinian gunmen use them as human shields while they fire at Israeli soldiers from mosques. Maybe we’re not good at semantic analysis, but it appears to us that it’s not exactly the “cycle of violence” that’s putting civilians in the line of fire and shrapnel.

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