Before I take a Sabbath break, and while IDF forces surround Gaza City, I want to write about some other aspects of this war.
First, there is the often cited fallacious idea that a response to a military attack should be “proportional”. The ICC lawyers actually think this is true. But they seem to have a problem when confronted with mass murderers and terrorists. Is the killing of ONE mass murderer proportional to the large number of victims whose lives he snuffed out? How do you judge an individual who is carrying out a program ordered by someone else? What if that “someone else” is a government? Or a terrorist group? Are the people who order the killing blameless? Neither those lawyers nor I have a definitive answer for this, but there are a few other points to consider.
Hamas leaders are proud of the massacre the executed on 7 Oct. One of their leaders said they would do it again as soon as they are able. What does that mean regarding responsibility? They killed 1400 civilians. Does that mean Israel can also kill 1400 civilians? Does the IDF have to stop when the casualty count of Palestinians reaches that number? In my view, proportionality has never been a measure that is useful in warfare. One of my own favorite quotes comes from World War One Royal Navy Admiral Jackie Fisher. “Moderation in Warfare is Imbecility”.
New Subject: When the war started all TV stations mobilized their employees to cover the action. Now we are a month later and, although the war still is a big story, their coverage of it is no longer worthy of filling the TV screens 24 hours a day. I do still bounce around between various stations to see who may have some new item to show, but a constant diet of war reports is, to tell the truth, boring. So what do we do when our normal entertainment shows have been replaced? We go to METV. It’s a VERY Christian station broadcasting from Cyprus that screens other items; not the war. We got to watch the final game of the MLB World Series on METV. Israeli stations stopped showing American baseball a long time ago. Israel has about 6 channels that screen basketball or football (soccer), but no American football; not NFL and not NCAAF. The movies we can watch on Israeli stations are often in Russian, Turkish, or French. The screen writers strike has resulted in American TV series shows disappearing from the air waves. Once again, METV came to the rescue.
They have a low budget. We get to see some REALLY old Westerns on METV. They air Gunsmoke (in color) and The Rifleman and Rawhide (in black and white!). There are probably a lot of you reading this that never saw a TV series that was not in color.
METV also has some old black and white movies from somebody’s archives. We might get to see an old classic like “Miracle on 34th Street” or a Marx Brothers comedy. It does give us a break from war news.
Wetherhorn 