Reflexive Equivalence Watch (Smuggling Arms From Israel Edition)
Moral equivalence and anti-Israel scapegoating do not always have to make sense. Since they're fundamentally irrational in the most academic sense - they arise not from careful reflection but more from ideological commitments - they can pop up in the weirdest contexts. "Everything that Israel's Arab enemies are doing Israel must also in some way be doing" - it's a habit of thought and a style of writing. And sometimes this habit and style can be particularly dumb:
Lebanon's army has begun setting up checkpoints near dozens of illegal border crossings with Syria and Israel in a bid to help prevent arms smuggling in the region, a Lebanese military official said today. The plan is apparently aimed primarily at preventing arms supplies from reaching Hezbollah guerrillas - a key demand of last week's UN ceasefire resolution that ended 34 days of ferocious fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Because if we want to stop arms smuggling into Lebanon, it's important to get those illegal Israel border crossings too. Let's devote a whole lot of troops there - those things are very porous, and Hezbollah undoubtedly gets thousands of weapons from Israel every day. Idiots.
And how could something like this make from a journalist, past an editor, and into print? Because it seems like the most natural thing in the world - it's precisely what you'd expect from the anti-Israel media, because it's precisely how the anti-Israel media approaches the conflict. That it's so silly merely makes it definitive that there's nothing that could have driven the journalist to write it other than pure habit.
Lebanon's army has begun setting up checkpoints near dozens of illegal border crossings with Syria and Israel in a bid to help prevent arms smuggling in the region, a Lebanese military official said today. The plan is apparently aimed primarily at preventing arms supplies from reaching Hezbollah guerrillas - a key demand of last week's UN ceasefire resolution that ended 34 days of ferocious fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Because if we want to stop arms smuggling into Lebanon, it's important to get those illegal Israel border crossings too. Let's devote a whole lot of troops there - those things are very porous, and Hezbollah undoubtedly gets thousands of weapons from Israel every day. Idiots.
And how could something like this make from a journalist, past an editor, and into print? Because it seems like the most natural thing in the world - it's precisely what you'd expect from the anti-Israel media, because it's precisely how the anti-Israel media approaches the conflict. That it's so silly merely makes it definitive that there's nothing that could have driven the journalist to write it other than pure habit.
