benwing asked: Dude, at least get your facts straight when writing a highly biased rant about Israel. The NYT article says this: "Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich of the Israeli military said on Twitter that the boy had died in an explosion of Palestinian ordnance." I.e. Israel is NOT claiming that this is a "random" body. If you believe that it's "laughable" that a mistargeted Palestinian rocket could fall on Gaza, that's your right, but that doesn't make it true.

Indeed he did say that.  Here are the tweets in question:

And I never said it was laughable that a mistargeted Palestinian rocket could fall on Gaza.  Here is what I said in the original post:

 [I]t is downright laughable to assume that there just happened to be a dead 6-year old boy lying around right at the time the airstrikes occurred for Hamas to hold up as an image of collateral damage.

The point remains that we have a dead Palestinian child’s body, presented in the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes, and a twitter post from an IDF officer who claims it’s the Palestinian’s fault.  Yet what we don’t have is any evidence from the Israeli government that it was a Palestinian rocket that killed this child.  

The question may be fairly asked, “why should we hold the burden of proof on Israel?”  Because this is not the first time that the Israeli government has tried to blame the deaths of Palestinian children on militants.  A twitter post from a vocal IDF military official does not relieve the credibility gap of the Israeli government.

As far as the allegations of bias go: if you re-read the post, you’ll probably glean that I have no particular love for Hamas.  Hamas is a  bad organization that does bad things, to Israelis and Palestinians alike.  But Israel’s refusal to take responsibility for its actions makes people more likely to flock to Hamas, because they are the only ones fighting back against what many Palestinians perceive as unjustified aggression.  That failure of accountability perpetuates Hamas’s political relevance in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which, as I said earlier, is bad for both Palestine and Israel.

1. letterstomycountry posted this