I am not the only one to read stories about the Lebanese Army fight against Fatah al-Islam terrorists in Lebanon and find myself wondering why the rules of war, diplomacy and semantics are so very different for Arabs and Jews.
I've already linked to this article that asks why the Lebanese army can go into a crowded civilian area and kill innocent people in the pursuit of terrorists, while Israel can never do that in world public opinion.
Eye on the World notices that Lebanese tanks and heavy artillery would be considered a "disproportionate response" in the Bizarro world that Israel is forced to inhabit.
I just can't get past the fact that people who were born and raised in Lebanon are considered "Palestinians" and that they are considered "refugees." In any other context, they would be considered Lebanese, but no one on the planet considers it inappropriate for Lebanon (or Syria or Jordan) to keep generations of Arabs in camps with few services and little prospects for jobs. No one says "apartheid" or "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing." Somehow, it is Israel's fault that Arab families are stuck in ghettoes in Lebanon for 60 years, and the UNRWA pretends to help these people by perpetuating their status as non-people with no rights. And when Lebanese kill a few dozen of them, hey, no biggie.
Their desire to integrate into the greater Lebanese society is given no weight whatsoever by the entire world of humanitarians and advocates for the downtrodden. Everyone "knows" that the best solution for them is to "return" to a state that they never lived in (and consequently destroy that same state.) 60 years of Arab desire to punish the Palestinian Arabs for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, 60 years of the most explicit kind of racial discrimination imaginable performed by their ersatz brothers, is crystallized as being moral.
The Arab attitude towards Palestinian Arabs can be summarized like this: Just wait a few more decades or centuries, and one day you can live in your very own Gaza. Meanwhile, we'll pretend to have your best interests at heart.
