The Redhunter

One of the things Israel is accused of doing is the illegal use of "white phosphorus," particularly in the form of what are called M825 Felt-Wedge projectiles. The claim is that the IDF is illegally using this and similar weapons in densely populated areas, and that this is illegal.

To be sure, White phosphorus can be nasty stuff. So can suicide vests, but the UN and so-called human rights groups can't be bothered with them. Might get death threats, you know.

John Noonan, writing at The Weekly Standard, explains

The problem in the UN's argument, as with most of the arguments against Israel's use of force in Gaza, is that it rewrites international treaties on warfare to better fit an anti-Israel narrative. White Phosphorous -- or 'Willy Pete' -- has been used for decades to create large smokescreens for troop cover and target illumination and is not -- despite any claim to the contrary -- an incendiary weapon (nor is it proscribed under any law on armed conflict). Article one of the treaty banning incendiaries says as much:

Incendiary weapon means any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons through the action of flame, heat, or combination thereof, produced by a chemical reaction of a substance delivered on the target. (a) Incendiary weapons can take the form of, for example, flame throwers, fougasses, shells, rockets, grenades, mines, bombs and other containers of incendiary substances.

(b) Incendiary weapons do not include:
(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems.

That's not to say Willy Pete is without collateral effects. There have been several documented cases where WP has injured or killed civilians, as the illuminant burns slowly at extremely high temperatures. But like with other legal conventional munitions such as artillery shells and guided bombs, the responsibility for incidental death and damage lies with Hamas and any other combatant which uses human shields to mask its operations.

International war crime statutes were written to prosecute those who fill mass graves with the bodies of noncombatants, the Hitlers and the Milosevics, not those who use legal illuminants in small, localized conflict. If a treatise on armed conflict can no longer differentiate between the use of military smoke shells and deliberate rocket attacks on civilian populations, the effect is to doom such treaties to irrelevance.

It's the last paragraph that's important. There is a type of "internationalist" and human-rights type who can no longer distinguish between a terrorist entity that deliberately puts it's own civilians in harms way hoping they will be killed so they can be used for propaganda, and a democracy fighting a defensive war imperfectly.

Balance of Outrage

What gets me is that the outrage over atrocities, real or imagined, is so far out of balance. No one would say that Israel, or the United States for that matter, is above reproach. If you want to say we should not use this or that weapon, fine, make your case.

But shouldn't you also spend just a little bit of time criticizing terrorists? If you want to ban cluster bombs ok, make your case, but why can't we have one banning suicide vests as well? Of course, we know why such a treaty doesn't exist; the UN and human rights organizations don't care, and the Muslim nations would object. They'd say that singled them out (as if banning cluster bombs doesn't single us out) or insist on an exemption for "wars of national liberation" (like they do for a simple definition of terrorism).

I've heard all the excuses about how we must maintain the moral high-ground, how it would be useless to ban something like suicide vests, or how two wrongs don't make a right so what does it matter? I don't buy any of them.

Melanie Phillips, as always, cuts to the heart of the matter and asks the right questions:

One final question: when Foreign Secretary David Miliband, UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon and a zillion others in the west lament the 1000 in Gaza whom the Israelis have killed, are they lamenting the killing of the 75 per cent-plus of that total who were Hamas terrorists, whose purpose in life was to annihilate Israel and exterminate Jews? Are they lamenting the killing today of the key senior Hamas leader Said Siyam, said to have been a radical close to Iran? Would they have preferred that all these individuals remained alive to continue pursuing their genocidal project? Are they saying that no-one should be killed in war and that therefore there should never be war? And if so, when will we hear Miliband similarly lament all those Taleban who have been and are still being killed by British forces in Afghanistan, along with al Qaeda in Iraq?

I'm not sure about the first three, but the answers to the last two are yes and that's probably next.

Double Standards

If the "world community" is so upset about civilian deaths in Gaza, why aren't they as concerned about what's going on in the Congo? A story in Pajamas Media, using at it's source a Ugandan news outlet, says that "over 1,000 civilians have been killed by a Ugandan rebel group since Christmas."

Terrible that so many of the horrors that take place in Africa go unreported.

Sunday Evening Update

Mona Charen adds more to our list of horrors ignored by those oh-so-concerned by Gaza:

Since the start of 2007, 16,000 civilians have been killed in fighting. Not in Gaza, so you may have missed it. It was in Somalia, where an Islamist movement is fighting Ethiopian troops. This is the 18th year of civil strife in that country.

In Sri Lanka, some 70,000 people have perished in a civil war that has flared on and off since 1983. The regime in Burma has killed thousands and forced an estimated 800,000 into involuntary servitude.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), 45,000 people are dying every month. Nearly 5.5 million have died since 1998 in a conflict that grew out of the violence in Rwanda and spread. Half of those deaths were of children under the age of five, according to the International Rescue Committee. The violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has caused more human devastation than any conflict since World War II.

In Darfur, Sudan, more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million made homeless by violence.