http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001145.html WIKILEAKS STORY REVEALS ISRAEL TOOK GREAT CARE TO AVOID CIVILIANS CASUALTIES
Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that at the very end of its news story on WikiLeaks’s release last weekend of documents detailing tens of thousands of casualties during the Iraq war, The New York Times revealed that for most of the last century, the average civilian-to-combatant wartime fatality ratio has been 10:1.
The Times reported (hat tip: Evelyn Gordon): “Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.”
Whereas in other modern wars, civilians account for 90 percent of casualties, by contrast in last year’s Israel-Hamas war in Gaza less than half of Palestinian fatalities – 39 percent – were noncombatants – and that number would have been even lower had Hamas not stored weapons in civilian institutions and fired rockets from private Palestinian homes which it commandeered.
“DISPROPORTIONATE” FORCE?
But although the IDF has managed to avoid killing civilians to a greater extent than almost any other army in conflict – often putting the lives of its own soldiers at great risk in doing so – Israel is obsessively singled out for enquiries into “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” by the UN and its accomplices such as Judge Richard Goldstone and Professor Richard Falk.
(Incidentally, even the most extreme anti-Israeli organizations, whose figures about the number of dead civilians in Gaza are almost always highly exaggerated, don’t claim that 90 percent of all casualties were civilians.)
Meanwhile, European governments (many of whom have combat troops in Afghanistan) and others continue hypocritically to single out Israel for using “disproportionate” force.
In a just world, the UN would open up an investigation into all 42 countries with combat troops in Afghanistan (and all the other dozens of conflicts around the world), and WikiLeaks would concentrate on revealing human rights violations and government cover-ups in countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
(I should point out that the civilians killed in Iraq after 2003 were, for the most part, killed by Iraqi, Iranian, and other jihadis, not by Americans; and that the number of Iraqi civilians killed each year since the American invasion/liberation, is lower than the numbers killed on average each year during Saddam’s rule.)
Topic: Wiki leaks inadvertently shows Israel extreme care to avoid civilian casualties (Read 419 times)