The Bidenites and Hypocrisy

The journalist Micah Halpern finds the hypocrisy of the Bidenites, presuming to lecture Israel on the need to “do more” to minimize civilian casualties (something the IDF does better than any other army in the history of warfare) hard to take. More on his response can be found here: “The US’s hypocrisy is infuriating – opinion,” by Micah Halpern, Jerusalem Post, May 7, 2024:

Quite frankly, the hypocrisy and holier-than-thou attitude of the United States toward Israel is truly infuriating.

The Pentagon recently announced that last year, on May 3, 2023, they mistakenly killed a civilian. It was not just a misguided, errant bullet that killed him. The United States had tracked a 53-year-old shepherd in northern Syria with a highly sophisticated Predator Drone. And then they launched a Hellfire Missile that blew him to smithereens. The Hellfire, a guided smart bomb, is not very big, it’s about five feet long, but the cost is ginormous – about $150,000 per missile. The Predator Drone, however, is huge. It is 28 feet long and has a wingspan of between 48 and 66 feet.

Turns out, the United States tracked a simple shepherd named Lufti Hassan Masto thinking he was an al-Qaeda leader. They were wrong. A year later, after “a thorough investigation,” the Pentagon admitted its mistake.

It was a very expensive mistake. Not just in monetary loss, but also perhaps more importantly, in credibility. It makes clear that the United States, too, makes mistakes. The United States, too, kills civilians in war. Of course, they do. The death of civilians is, unfortunately, a part of the cost of war. Good nations don’t target innocent civilians. Good nations, like Israel and the United States, try their best to minimize civilian casualties.

And yet, while at the same time that the United States is openly admitting their mistake – albeit a full year later, they are crucifying Israel for civilian deaths, crucifying Israel for what the Pentagon euphemistically terms “collateral damage.” The infuriating part is that the US admits that they do exactly what they are asking Israel not to do. A pure case of “do as I say, not as I do” military style.

And please, do not think for even one moment that the United States accidentally killed only one single civilian.

According to a piece published in the The Guardian on Tuesday, September 7, 2021, the United States is responsible for the killing of at least 22,000 civilians – perhaps as many as 48,000 since 9/11….

So, while I applaud the Pentagon for admitting that they mistakenly killed a Syrian shepherd, I just wish they would apply the same standard to Israel that they apply to themselves. But for now, that act of understanding and global recognition doesn’t seem to fit their agenda.

It’s more than infuriating – It’s shameful.

Not once has Biden, or Blinken, or Sullivan, mentioned the 14 million leaflets the IDF has dropped over northern Gaza in the early days of the war to warn civilians away from areas about to become a battlefield, or from buildings that were soon to be targeted. Nor have they mentioned the Israel has made over 70,000 direct phones calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15 million prerecorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take. The IDF has even deployed drones with speakers attached, that begin “speaking” their warnings as soon as they hit the ground — a remarkable advance that Israeli technologists came up with to do something no other army, as John Spencer has written, “in the history of warfare has done.” The IDF has also announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate. No other army in the world warns enemy soldiers about attacks in this manner. No other army is so solicitous of the wellbeing of civilians in the enemy camp. But not a single aspect of this massive warning operation has been mentioned by the Bidenites, who instead keep insisting that Israel must not do in Rafah what it has done elsewhere in Gaza.

Furthermore, the Bidenites have failed to mention the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in Gaza, which is the key indicator of how much is being done by the IDF to minimize casualties. According to the UN, in all the wars fought since World War II, the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths has been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to get this ratio down to 4:1. In Iraq, the American military did even better, lowering the ratio to 3:1 — that is, three civilians killed for every combatant. But in Gaza, the IDF has managed to achieve a civilian-to-combatant ratio of close to 1:1, that is, one civilian death for every combatant killed. This is information that the public, subjected to endless tales of Palestinian “civilians being killed in Gaza” needs to know. It does not fit the anti-Israel narrative that the Bidenites are now disseminating, claiming that the IDF must not behave in Rafah as it has elsewhere in Gaza. But the IDF has behaved admirably elsewhere in Gaza, with its elaborate system of warning preventing many civilian deaths. The Bidenites are not about to let these facts be submitted to a candid world.

So we will have to do it for them — right here at Jihad Watch.