ALL DEATHS ARE NOT MORALLY EQUAL STATEWIDE Edition

• Published in: The Hartford courant
• Main Authors: Faust, Halley S, Halley S. Faust of West Hartford recently returned from a trip to Israel, and has done business there since 1991.
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hartford, Conn Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 10.08.2001
• ISSN: 1047-4153

Under similar circumstances, Israel defends its troops on the ground in disputed territories. When Israel identifies suicide-bomb planners and eliminates them by targeted airstrikes, the outside world claims this is an "unbalanced" response. But is it any more unbalanced than the airstrikes against the Somalis? It is also instructive to compare the reactions of the United States and Israel to having soldiers -- some of them wounded -- trapped by an extremely hostile armed mob. When U.S. soldiers were trapped by much larger Somali forces in the battle mentioned above, the United States rescued them at the cost of more than 500 Somali lives. When Israeli soldiers were under siege at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, with Cpl. Yosef Madhat seriously wounded by gunfire, an Israeli request to Palestinian forces to allow his evacuation was refused, causing Cpl. Madhat to bleed to death. Please don't tell me that pent-up frustration about the peace process justifies the blatant racism and incitement preached to Palestinian children in school textbooks or broadcast on Palestinian TV, which on Aug. 3 showed Sheik Ibrahim Madhi in a Gaza mosque imploring his flock to "voluntarily detonat[e] ourselves in their midst" and gave "blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew's head."