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Hamas wants to pile up ‘telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause’ — Netanyahu, on television

Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer got a one-on-one with Benjamin Netanyahu and asked him about the disturbing optics of the Gaza onslaught, in which Israel has now killed hundreds of civilians, many of them children:

You see these painful pictures though of these Palestinian children and these refugees, thousands of them, fleeing their homes. It’s a horrendous sight right now– if you look at the images, heart-wrenching. What goes through your mind when you see that?

Netanyahu:

I’m very sad. When I see that I’m very sad. We’re sad for every civilian casualty. They’re not intended. This is the difference between us. The Hamas deliberately targets civilians and deliberately hides behind civilians.  They imbed their rocketeers, their rocket caches, their other weaponry, which they use to fire on us in civilian areas… What choice do we have?…

All civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said, and I mean, it’s gruesome, but they use telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause. They want– the more dead the better.

This is the Israeli talking point. David Brooks of the New York Times, who has said that he is an ardent supporter of Israel, said on public radio Friday that

Hamas has basically decided they want to see their own people killed as a propaganda coup. And I think here again the administration – Bill Clinton and others – have named things very accurately. And what we’re seeing is sort of a desperate Hamas trying to gin up some sort of publicity coup through the death of their own people.

Brooks is referring to these comments by Bill Clinton:

[Hamas has] a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so that the rest of the world will condemn them….

In the short and medium term Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage by forcing (Israel) to kill Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas.

P.S. And what is Wolf Blitzer’s role here, to promote the Israeli PM? Writes Medea Benjamin.

Thanks to Annie Robbins.

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The Zionists are going NUTS – literally. Well, I mean they always have been nutty, but now it’s plain for the world to see.

Their ‘we are the victim’ line is just impossible to sell, with hundreds of dead civilians, many of them children, and almost all the Israelis casualties being soldiers. Even an AIPAC hack like Blitzer has to admit it.

Of course it is Netanhayu who wants to pile up Palestinian corpses to feed the bloodlust of his worst people.

This is the result you get when a racist warcriminal gets loose. This man is a psychopath.

How fortunate for Hamas, then, that Israel is willing to oblige.

This whole “intent” thing is Western BS most of the time. In some cases, yes, there really is such a category as “collateral damage”. I once read someone (a famous writer, but his name slips my mind) who said that we tend to romanticize WWII way too much, but the real war was a bloody mess and he gave as one example the many thousands of French civilians accidentally killed by Allied bombing. But that was a world war with crude 1940’s technology. Obviously there’s a distinction between the accidental killing of French civilians and the quite deliberate firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, or the machine gunning of random civilians that Chuck Yeager says he was ordered to do in his autobiography.

Nowadays Westerners are the alleged good guys who never want to kill civilians, yet it’s often thought useful to target civilian infrastructure and maybe even civilians themselves to pressure the other side. The weaponry is far more precise than what was available in 1944. So what to do? Well, hit the infrastructure and employ tactics guaranteed to kill civilians, but not as many as one could do if one wanted to go the Dresden/Hamburg route. And deny any ill-intent. It’s transparently hypocritical, but it fools Westerners who want to be fooled.

Sanctions also fall into that category. One can tell that Westerners all know that draconian sanctions hurt innocent people, because even the slightest symbolic slap at Israel that only hurt feelings brings out the moral condemnations, but nice little liberals like Nick Kristof think that non-Western civilians are perfectly acceptable targets for sanctions that destroy economies and kill people for lack of medical supplies or lack of good drinking water.

I think that’s about the sickest thing that SOB has said so far, I’m sure there will be more unless he chokes on one of his lies and suffocates. Why didn’t they cut his mic? He’s nobody, he’s a rotten piece of human waste with that awful smirk on his face how could anyone let him speak? I think what he described is probably what he’d like to do himself because I don’t believe he or his cabinet or any of the criminals in the knesset gives a good damn about anything but themselves and their bank accounts. Dear God make it stop!