Joseph Dana's Selective Outrage

I am hoping that you all remember last week when five Israelis were murdered in the West Bank. If you have forgotten, don't beat yourself up too badly, apparently HP blogger Joseph Dana forgot to come into work that day too. Along with the rest of the Huffington Post blogger stable. But don't you worry, because here comes Dana to tell us about how the Palestinians are really the victims of this latest round of violence! His latest piece is about settler "reprisals" for that attack, an attack that he overlooked. How typical.

Here is Mr. Dana's chief complaints:

" Settlers have been burning fields, destroying property, stoning Palestinian houses and erecting new settlement outposts in response to the shooting....On September 4th, I interviewed three Palestinian families whose homes have been taken over by the Israeli army in response to the killings of the settlers."

Now, I am tempted to use the typical Palsbara response to this, which I am sure you have seen before. It goes something like this:

"Dead Israelis: 5
Dead Palestinians: 0
End of discussion!"

 Though morality by numbers is not an argument that I aspire to (and neither do the AZs, when it doesn't favor them) it is rather fascinating that the sympathy for the murdered settlers is not one tenth that of the sympathy for a burned field. At least not in the minds of Joseph Dana and his supporters. Who was that who don't have respect for human life? Oh wait, I forgot, settlers aren't human. My bad.

Mr. Dana's complaints take two major forms, as you can check by reading the article: That the settlers attack the Palestinians with rocks while the army doesn't do enough to protect them and the the Israeli soldiers occupy Palestinian homes without permission.

Now, first of all I think it is interesting that when it is Palestinians on the receiving end of rock throwing, suddenly it becomes a problem. How many anti-Zionist have been so quick to tell us that rocks are "harmless" or that protests which involve rock throwing are "non-violent?" Especially when you look at Mr. Dana's article and see that no Palestinians were killed by the rock throwers nor was their home damaged. This is not to say that the actions of the IDF and settlers are not reprehensible, because they are. But if you don't see my issue with Mr. Dana's choice of topics, just switch the nationalities around: If it were Israelis who were being attacked by rocks after an IDF attack which killed five Palestinians, would anyone care? Certainly not Mr. Dana. He would not be trying to put a human face on any suffering Israelis. That certainly strikes me as pretty hypocritical, if not racist. Consider further that on Friday a group of Arab rock throwers injured eleven Israeli policemen. The Huffington Post (and Mr. Dana) were nowhere to be found. I guess not all rock throwing victims are created equal?

Consider further a favorite anti-Zionist excuse for terror: "It's a natural reaction to X" where X is some Israeli policy. Why is it that violence against settlers is "a natural reaction" but violence by settlers is not? Especially when their fellow settlers were the ones who were murdered? Just another Huffington Post double standard.

It also says on the bottom of Mr. Dana's article that it "originally appeared in Electronic Intifada." Tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it?