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Now!
Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared
in the Washington Post on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would
be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government.
"Anyone who knows anything
about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness,"
he wrote. "For Israel, a small country within reach, as
we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back
yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide.
The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good
enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary
to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your
lights."
Cohen likes to sit in front
of a computer and use flip phrases like "punch out your
lights" as euphemisms for burning human flesh and bones
with high-tech weapons, courtesy of American taxpayers.
In mid-November 1998, when
President Clinton canceled plans for air attacks on Iraq after
Saddam Hussein promised full cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors,
Cohen wrote: "Something is out of balance here. The Clinton
administration waited too long to act. It needed to punch out
Iraq's lights, and it did not do so."
The resort to euphemism tells
us a lot. So does Cohen's track record of sweeping statements
on behalf of his zeal for military actions funded by the U.S.
Treasury.
On February 6, 2003, the Washington
Post published Richard Cohen's judgment the morning after Colin
Powell made his televised presentation to the U.N. Security Council.
"The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some
of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in
its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't
accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt
still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool -- or
possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."
Cohen's moral certainties are
on a par with his technical ones. While he condemns rockets fired
into Israel, he expresses pleasure about missiles fired by the
Israeli government. That the death toll of civilians is far higher
from Israel's weaponry does not appear to bother him. On the
contrary, he seems glad about the killing spree by the Israeli
military.
In a column with bigoted overtones
("Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located,
gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood"), Cohen's eagerness
to support additional large-scale bombing by Israel is thematic.
Consider this passage: "Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran
and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a
dazed suicide bomber over the border -- all that is needed is
the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the
case, it's either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality.
The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and
old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians
understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those
rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price."
Such phrasing is classic evasion
by keyboard cheerleaders for war: "The" Lebanese. "The"
Palestinians. "They will pay a very, very steep price."
Meanwhile, in the real world, the vast majority of the victims
of the Israeli onslaught are civilians being subjected to collective
punishment.
Cohen -- like so many others
in the American punditocracy -- depicts the death of an Israeli
civilian as far more tragic and important than the death of an
Arab civilian.
There's something really sick
about such righteous support for civilian death and destruction.
Osama bin Laden, meet Richard
Cohen.
Richard, meet Osama.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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