Several footnotes to the preceding

- The US branch of Amnesty International has sent a letter to US Secretary of State Can'tBe Right saying the group is

particularly dismayed at the lopsided response by the US government to the recent violence and its lackadaisical efforts to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. ...

Without diminishing the responsibility of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups for indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians, the US government must not ignore Israel's disproportionate response and the longstanding policies which have brought the Gaza Strip to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

Then again, maybe they're just being foolish: In response to a French proposal for a 48-hour "humanitarian cease-fire," Livni claimed that

[t]here is no humanitarian crisis, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce.

I guess the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) doesn't know what it's talking about.

- The bias in US media coverage continues as unabated as the violence. The NYT said that

[w]hile thousands of protesters marched in cities across Europe to demand a halt to the Israeli bombing, in Prague, a spokesman for the new Czech presidency of the European Union said Israel’s actions were “defensive, not offensive.”

Other European countries quickly distanced themselves from the Czech position. The French Foreign Ministry condemned both “the Israeli ground offensive against Gaza as it condemns the continuation of rocket firing.”

In London, Foreign Minister David Miliband urged both sides to accept an immediate cease-fire.

So they found one official to defend Israel while other European nations "distanced themselves" from him as tens of thousands marched in protest. This is what the Times described as a "mixed" reaction.

- The US continued its own "evenhanded" policy, blaming Hamas "thugs" for the violence by having "deliberately targeted innocent Israelis” in “an act of terror."

And indeed yes, targeting civilians is terrorism - let's make no bones about that and I'll take this opening to say for anyone out there so constrained in their thinking that they can't see the world in anything other than black and white, my condemnation of Israel does not mean I support Hamas and it does not mean I condone its shelling of civilians. But, still, haven't the Israelis also targeted civilians? Haven't they attacked mosques, homes, schools? On no, that's different. You see, Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak said

[w]e are not war hungry. ... We have no aggressive intentions.... ... We are peace seekers.

What's more, in a press release the IDF said it

wishes to reiterate that the residents of Gaza are not the target of the operation. Those who use civilians, the elderly, women and children as human shields are responsible for any and all injuries to the civilian population. Anyone who hides a terrorist or weapons in his house is considered a terrorist.

So it's simple. If Hamas kills civilians, it's Hamas's fault. If the IDF kills civilians, it's Hamas's fault. It reminds me of an abusive husband screaming at his bloodied wife, "Look at what you made me do!"

- Bush also claimed the US is

"leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected.” Such a truce, he said, will require monitoring mechanisms to help ensure that the smuggling of weapons into Gaza ends.

The key to peace, it seems, is keeping weapons out of the hands of Palestinians while continuing to pour them into Israel. Which is, again, just so even-handed at to make one weep.

- Where is Obama? Keeping his head down, insisting through a spokeswoman. “There is one president at a time." Which is just as well, considering that in August he said

If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Now, there's change you can believe in. Isn't it?

- On Saturday, the UN Security Council was considering a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and expressing concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas. The US blocked the resolution.

- This comes via A Tiny Revolution. The Israeli military released a video supposedly showing the destruction of a truck full of Grad missiles. However, the Israeli civil rights group B'Tselem investigated the case and supported the claim of the owner of the truck that what the Israelis claimed were missiles were actually gas canisters he was removing from his shop along with other pieces after the shop next door to his got bombed. In an al-Jazeera report, a member of the group noted that there were still canisters lying around the truck and that if they had been missiles ready for launch, the secondary explosion would have destroyed the vehicle - and as the correspondent noted, no one was carrying a weapon, which would seem to be unusual if the people were Hamas militants.

For myself, I admit to not being an expert intelligence analyst, but in watching the video I kept thinking that you could tell that some things heavy and cylindrical were being loaded but how you could tell exactly what they were is beyond me.

This is not the first time Israelis have made such false claims: In 2004, during an earlier attack into Gaza, the IDF accused the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of allowing one of its ambulances to be used to transport a Kassem rocket, backed up by a video of a long, thin object being put in the back of the vehicle. It turned out to be a folded stretcher that was obviously too light and too thin to be a Kassem rocket. The IDF pulled the video from its website, but you can see it here.

- Finally, in scouring links related to this and the previous post, I came across an interesting person, one Avraham Burg. You can read more about him and his ideas about Israel at these various links. He recently became involved with a group called J Street, which calls itself "the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement."