Under the Cover of U.S. Elections

Updated Below:

The S.O.B.'s take revenge:

JERUSALEM, Nov. 3 Israeli troops fired at a large crowd of unarmed Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip today as the women approached a mosque to help Palestinian militants holed up inside. Two women were killed and about 10 were injured, according to hospital workers.

Civilized?

Update: Billmon takes posts like this to task today. While it is almost impossible to argue with him, since he writes so well, I think on this issue that he is working under a false assumption. More about that in a minute. Billmon points out that the IDF claimed that they were firing at a man who was with the women and that the man was using the women as a shield, in violation of the rules of war (whatever they are these days.)

I can't argue that this is not true and that I have fed into a false charge against the IDF, if the underlying assertion that the two sides are "equal" in some militaristic way. But, and it is a big 'but,' they are clearly not. This is not classic warfare. These are not uniformed troops on the battlefield, of course. The IDF operates very much like the proverbial shooting of fish in the barrel. Nothing is sacrosanct when it comes to the enemy, which happens to be the several hundred million other people that live around them. So, cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of invading Lebanon? Go for it. Let them remember that the IDF was there for many moons.

Furthermore, the meme that Billmon shoots out there, that this is a tribal squabble over land, is a littledisingenuouss. It ignores the fact that, except in some strange Biblical sense that 'God gave this land to Israel' the Israelis are squatters on what, for the most part, had been Palestinian land. I have never heard of Palestinians wanting to take over land that had traditionally been occupied by Jews from the midEast.

In my view, the Palestinians have been forced from their lands in a most brutal way and they are fighting back like any of the rest of us would (and as Native Americans did until they were vanquished by superior firepower, except maybe General Custer). When the French Resistance was using terror tactics to fight their German occupiers, we made them intoheroess. Yet when the Algerians foughtback against the French, we had little sympathy.

I guess money is thicker than water.