Crocodile tears for dead children

Jimmy Carter’s interview on Al Jazeera has to be the single most asinine interview Carter has given in his long, very public career. How he could even keep a straight face when he suggested Palestinians do not engage in terrorism when they launch kassam attacks at Israeli civilian populations is beyond me. Carter is being widely disparaged, and rightly so for his personal skewered definition of terrorism. But that wasn’t his only asinine statement and this one deserves the same treatment.

In my book, I talk about violence from both sides, and I describe very carefully and accurately the number of casualties among Palestinians and Israelis, including children. The number of Palestinian children who died because of the violence is five times greater than the number of Israeli children, and I condemn this kind of violence on both sides.

There is a cultural reason why Palestinian child causalities are 5 times greater than Israeli child casualties, and it’s not for a lack of motivation or trying on part of the Palestinians. Israeli parents rarely send their children outside to riot against Fatah/Hamas/Islamic Jihad forces.

Nor do Israelis build bomb making facilities in the family recreational room, hence the low incidence of “work related explosions” in Israeli homes. It has never been considered a common rite of adolescent passage for Israeli youths to act as human shields for the IDF. Call the IDF old fashioned or quaint, but using Israeli civilians as cannon folder has just not made its’ way into the IDF’s military doctrine.