If Hezbollah attacks, Israeli minister vows to bomb "Lebanon’s civilians" including Shia "back to the Middle Ages." https://t.co/13XP3OjxBs pic.twitter.com/YOtZPL0PZp— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 11, 2017
This is not what Bennett said.
Here is what he said:
Hunting rocket launchers during a war is almost impossible, Bennett told Haaretz this week, adding that he says this “as someone who specialized in hunting rocket launchers.”Bennett never said he wanted to bomb civilians, but he wants to relay the message that Israel is prepared to bomb civilian infrastructure that is being used illegally by Hezbollah - which are legitimate and legal targets in war. Yet he is not saying that this should be Israel's actual war plan, but something to warn the Lebanese to understand the consequences of allowing them to essentially give their government over to Hezbollah and Iran, both of whom would gladly sacrifice Lebanese lives in their zeal to hurt Israel.
...11 years have passed and Hezbollah has learned to deploy in a more sophisticated manner. “They moved their launchers from the nature reserves, outposts in open areas, to dense urban areas. You can’t fight rockets with tweezers. If you can’t reach the house where the launcher is, you’re not effective, and the number of houses you have to get through is enormous,” he explained.
... “Today, Hezbollah is embedded in sovereign Lebanon. It is part of the government and, according to the president, also part of its security forces. The organization has lost its ability to disguise itself as a rogue group.”
Bennett believes this should be Israel’s official stance. “The Lebanese institutions, its infrastructure, airport, power stations, traffic junctions, Lebanese Army bases – they should all be legitimate targets if a war breaks out. That’s what we should already be saying to them and the world now. If Hezbollah fires missiles at the Israeli home front, this will mean sending Lebanon back to the Middle Ages,” he said. “Life in Lebanon today is not bad – certainly compared to what’s going on in Syria. Lebanon’s civilians, including the Shi’ite population, will understand that this is what lies in store for them if Hezbollah is entangling them for its own reasons, or even at the behest of Iran.”
At the same time, he notes that this is not necessarily the plan for a future war, but instead an attempt to avoid one: “If we declare and market this message aggressively enough now, we might be able to prevent the next war. After all, we have no intention of attacking Lebanon.”
According to Bennett, if war breaks out anyway, a massive attack on the civilian infrastructure – along with additional air and ground action by the IDF – will speed up international intervention and shorten the campaign. “That will lead them to stop it quickly – and we have an interest in the war being as short as possible,” he said. “I haven’t said these things publicly up until now. But it’s important that we convey the message and prepare to deal with the legal and diplomatic aspects. That is the best way to avoid a war.”
This is his plan for avoiding war. The execrable Ken Roth is framing it as if Bennett is telling the world that he wants Israel to attack civilians.
Even the leftist Haaretz doesn't spin this interview with Bennett to make him appear to be a warmonger the way Roth does. Author Amos Harel, who has written a book about the 2006 Lebanon war, praises Bennett's military positions as "complex" and says he displays a "healthy skepticism over positions taken by top defense officials, and he refuses to accept their insights as indisputable conclusions."
It is bad enough that the leader of a human rights organization is so willing to lie to denigrate Israel. Roth would no doubt argue that he doesn't single out Israel but he will expose anyone worldwide who threatens to attack civilians.
Yet only in February Hezbollah threatened to launch strikes at Israel's nuclear power plant and at ammonia tanks in Haifa, which he said could result in the deaths of 800,000 Israelis.
Civilians.
The people that Human Rights Watch pretends to care about.
Unless, dare I say it, they happen to be Israeli Jews.
Because a direct threat by the effective leader of Lebanon towards nearly a million Jews is not worth a single tweet from self-appointed arbiter of morality Ken Roth from among the 600 tweets he has written since then.
Ken Roth is an abomination.
He has turned Human Rights Watch into a joke and yet he can act with impunity since the media won't go after a "human rights" NGO.
If anyone applied the standards of morality, truth and fairness to Ken Roth that he pretends to demand from others, he would fail miserably. He is a hypocrite, a liar and openly and provably biased.
(h/t Yenta P)