Against barbarism

Since news broke of the Hamas atrocities done to the people of southern Israel, there have been mutterings -- "it's just like 9/11 ..." 

It's not. Why do I say that? Because it is still possible in U.S. mainstream media to demand elementary common sense and conformity with international law without being called a traitor. Listen to Perry Bacon Jr writing in the Washington Post (gift article):

Biden and his administration need to change their approach. They should stop saying “Israel has a right to defend itself” in a vague way, without any preconditions, such as abiding by international law and minimizing the deaths of Palestinian civilians. There is not a real debate about whether Israel has the right to defend itself. It does. The question is how Israel defends itself. And if the Israelis’ answer is that defending themselves means bombing everything in Gaza with little regard for the lives of Palestinian civilians and demanding fast, mass evacuations that they know can’t actually happen, then the United States and the rest of the world should reject that answer and push for an alternative.

... “Israel has a right to defend itself” is not a vision or a policy. We should come up with one — immediately.

Of course it may seem relatively cheap to make such an appeal because we're an ocean away and it wasn't (with exceptions) our citizens who were murdered. But calls to recognize the horrors which the impulse to raw vengeance implies, also come, loudly, from some Israelis (I published one here) and from brave voices in Israel. 

After 9/11, in the dazed horror that persisted for days -- a horror compounded both of the Al-Qaeda atrocities and of fear of what our own government would do in response -- the Erudite Partner and I printed and made widely available this simple sign which some folks hung in San Francisco windows:

That message remains on point. To demand better of our governments is not to deny the humanity of Israeli victims; it might even be to honor them. Barbarism is not good for children and living things, to paraphrase the Vietnam-era truism.