www.townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/ck20020503.shtml
Jerusalem Post, April 28 "Holley told Agence France-Presse that he did not see 'any evidence of a massacre. David Holley, British military adviser to Amnesty International, April 28 WASHINGTON--A massacre is the deliberate mass murder of the defenseless. The secretary- general appointed a special investigating committee (now disbanded). The European press published the most lurid allegations. Yet this same Middle East conflict yields no shortage of real massacres: --April 27: Adora, Palestinian gunmen enter residential quarters shooting everyone, including a 5-year-old girl shot through the head in her bed; The links of its top leadership to these murders is precisely the kind of question that warrants investigation. The fact that such an undertaking is unimaginable is what has made the last several months so deeply, despairingly troubling. The despair comes from the bewilderment of living in a world of monstrous moral inversion. That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation. Twenty-one months ago, Israel offered a total end to the occupation, ceding 100 percent of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank to the first Palestinian state ever. The Palestinians turned that down and took up the suicide bomb. By the Orwellian logic of today, the Palestinians are justified in perpetrating one massacre after another to end an occupation that Israel offered to remove almost two years ago. For the "international community,'' as embodied by the United Nations, such inverted moral logic is the norm. This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong--the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich. Churchill's great gift to civilization was not just that he rallied good against evil, but that he pierced a suffocating fog of self-deception by speaking truth to lies. Then write a letter to your Members of Congress or your local newspapers, who you can find by entering your ZIP code in the boxes below. Also make sure to tell your newspaper editors that they should carry your favorite conservative columnists! NOTE: Columns will not be automatically attached to the emails you send through this tool.
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