HOWARD EPSTEIN: ANOTHER LAW FOR EVERYONE ELSE….
The war imposed on Israel by the egregiously vile atrocities of 7 October 2023 is not the first, nor will it be the last, example of a sovereign nation seeking to suppress a terrorist entity and having to do so in a wholly urban environment. In December 1994, for a similar purpose, Putin’s Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Chechnya. Its capital, Grozny, was heavily bombed and thousands of civilians died. Again, from 1999 to 2009, the city of Grozny was almost completely erased by what was effectively carpet-bombing by the Russian Air Force. By 2003, the United Nations had called Grozny “the most destroyed city on Earth”. Some estimates, such as one by the Russian government, have put the number of civilian deaths in Grozny as high as 200,000.
Aleppo may yet be called the second most destroyed city on Earth. In the Syrian civil war from March 2011 (and still ongoing), the Russian air force was again active, and again civilians died in large numbers. This was, of course, intentional as the Russian bombing campaign was undertaken to assist the Syrian dictator, Bashir Al Assad, in winning the Syrian civil war. Indeed, most of Syria was bombarded in the twelve months from March 2011, with civilian deaths estimated by the UN Human Rights Office at 306,887.
The collapse of the Syrian government, and of Syrian civil society, led , in or around 2014, to the formation of the self-declared Islamic State (“IS”, or ISIL, ISIS or Da’esh). Islamic terrorists took advantage of the collapse of Syria as a functioning state and captured large swathes of eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. Within a year, more than 30,000 IS fighters imposed upon some twelve million people an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. By looting and plunder, not least of bank vaults, IS soon had a fighting fund of some US$1 billion.
All this was seen by the West as a threat to the stability of the region and perhaps beyond. Several air forces combined to suppress IS. Airstrikes were conducted for the following five years by the United States (70%), the United Kingdom (20%) and France, Turkey, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Jordan (together 10%).
According to Airwars, an organisation that tracks civilian casualties in armed conflict, at least 33,000 civilians were killed by airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during the US-led campaign against IS from 2014 to 2019. That figure was effectively corroborated by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Human rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch, have accused the US-led coalition of failing to take adequate precautions to avoid civilian casualties, which seems somewhat muted as compared with what has been going on in London for the past three months, with weekly calls for Jihad and the elimination from the planet of all “Zios” (ie Jews).
Now consider the IDF attacks on Gaza, allegedly having caused some 25,000 deaths in three months. First, it beggars belief that Hamas, known more for its hyperbole than modesty of expression, would not have inflated the figures. Then, there is a complete absence of claims, or evidence, of mass graves containing thousands of dead Gazans in the Strip. There are suggestions on YouTube of some 200 bodies in buried together; and, absent mass burial sites for thousands, when was there time for, and where is the evidence of, over 24,000 individual funerals having been carried out? Surely CNN and Sky News have not been keeping such images from us.
As compared with Grozny, the Syrian civil war and the elimination of IS in Syria/Iraq, evidence of carpet bombing in Gaza by the Israeli Air Force (“IAF”) in Gaza is significant by its absence. Israel had at the outset of the current war thousands of identified Hamas targets, both buildings and individual terrorists. Every IAF strike is carefully target-focused. Of course, there has been collateral damage – the deaths of innocents – but not as a result of indiscriminate bombing.
None of this history moderated the complaints of the whole world – not even those of the Americans and the British – about Israel, and none of it has diluted the vilification of Israel in which the demonstrators in Western cities have indulged.
Nor does it end there. We read of British civil servants and American federal workers complaining that their respective governments have been too easy on Israel. They demand an end to the war – immediately and before Israel has achieved its objectives – in a way that was never demanded in respect of Grozny, Aleppo, or the areas controlled by IS.
Well, those who criticise Israel now have something else to consider. On 8 October last, Biden himself said that the attacks on Israel the previous day were of the order of fifteen 9/11s. (In fact, he was somewhat conservative because the population of the USA is over 30 times greater than that of Israel.) And yet America, whilst seeking to restrain Israel, reacts with something close to zero tolerance where its own people are concerned.
Three US soldiers were killed by a missile attack on an American base in Jordan, on the borders of Iraq and Syria, on 29 January. Within a week, at the behest of Biden, the US Air Force had sent two B1B bombers from the continental United States, and other aircraft and missiles in the Middle East, to destroy 85 Iran-proxy targets. Zero tolerance seems a fitting precedent that Israel should follow in the future; and it seems it has been doing so in the north to deter Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah.
By the time you read this, there may be a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. It is to be hoped that Israel will have taken the initiative and massively degraded the terrorists’ 160,000-strong stockpile of missiles before too many can be fired at the Jewish state.
It is unlikely, in any event, that any number of Jewish casualties will bring out droves of vociferous demonstrators calling for the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea to be made safe for the nine million “Zios” whose last and only refuge is …. nowhere else on earth.
Talk about one law for us and another for everyone else!
© Howard Epstein – February 2024 (www.howard-epstein.com)
