Things Are Going Relatively Well---Except For The Stupid Dead

Kevin Drum alerts us to that celebrated humanitarian, Alan Dershowitz, who yesterday extended a gesture of healing reconciliation via the LA Times Op-Ed page:

"The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.

If the media were to adopt this "continuum," it would be informative to learn how many of the "civilian casualties" fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence.

Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others."

Where have we heard this before? Where...where...? Oh, yeah...those other stupid dead people:

"(CNN) -- The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN. "I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said."

So by Dershowitz' logic, the Jews who failed to flee the Nazis deserved their fates, or at least were culpable and thus not nearly as tragic as those who died trying to escape.

Some are more equal than others. The fact that Israel had planned this attack for over a year and would have hit Lebanon regardless of provocation, AND that some here in the US knew it was going to happen, fails to register in this convenient calculus.

And thus are filthy consciences cleansed.