Rush Limbaugh & Bin Laden On Civilian Deaths

Yanked this off another forum:

"Until civilians -- frankly, I'm not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men -- but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that.”

Rush Limbaugh

On the Qana Massacre
July 31, 2006

"We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal . . . As for what you asked regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places."

Osama bin Laden

On His Fatwa Against America
March 1997

So what does this tell you about bin Laden and Limbaugh?

I heard Randi Rhodes go off on this point a day or two ago. Really puts things into perspective.

Yeah, they both agree with murdering civilians. Rush is no different than Osama.

I found this googling...

http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/05-24-99.html

May 24, 1999

Let’s Kill Some Civilians

Memo To: Tony Snow, FoxNewsSunday
From: Jude Wanniski
CC: Sen. Joe Lieberman [D-CT]
Re: Why Not? The Ends Justify the Means!

Another good show, Tony, but I still think you are too easy on your guests. Senator Lieberman is such a sweet man, with such a sweet voice and demeanor. His colleagues all marvel at what a spiritual fellow he is, how he took the floor of the Senate to sermonize on how dreadful it was for the President to commit serial felonies and lie under oath and do all kinds of bad stuff in the Oval Office with young girls. With all that piety, I did notice he voted to leave his friend Bill in office and give him another chance. Now Lieberman sees Bill doing good, I see on your show Sunday, killing civilians in Yugoslavia. What a great idea!!! If you can’t get at the soldiers of the Butcher of Belgrade (or Baghdad, for that matter), why not target schools and hospitals and prisons? If NATO can slaughter enough women and children and senior Serbs and Albanians (by the carload, if possible) then sweet Joe Lieberman will assure his constituents in Connecticut, and elsewhere, that the Serbian army will get so mad at NATO for killing their civilians, they will turn their guns on the Butcher of Belgrade. Or maybe Slobodan Milosevic will get tears in his eyes and call the whole thing off.

Excuse me? Call what off? Milosevic has agreed to go back to the status quo ante, before NATO began the bombing that sent a million civilians fleeing the bombing zone to escape the carnage. Joe’s Democratic colleague from Massachusetts, John Kerry, has been saying for several weeks that this is what we should accept from Milosevic, because he could not possibly accept the terms Madeleine Albright set forth, with a NATO soldier on every street corner of Belgrade and Kosovo, to make sure Milosevic would not kill any civilians! Huh? Here is the exchange that got my full attention, Tony. It was when Lieberman said he believed we were making an effort to "bring the war in Kosovo home to the people, the civilians of Belgrade, so that they pressure Milosevic to break and make an agreement with Milosevic." You expressed surprise: "But wait, I thought we weren’t trying to make life miserable for regular, everyday Serbs." And he replied: Oh, we are, I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months. We’re not only hitting military targets, otherwise why would we be cutting off the water supply and knocking out the power stations -- turning the lights out. We’re trying through the air campaign to break the will of the Serbian people so they will force their leader to break his will to then order the troops -- his troops -- out of Kosovo."

I’m sorry to tell the Senator, but killing civilians explicitly in order to defeat their leaders was outlawed by the Geneva Convention in 1924, even before Adolf Hitler decided to kill civilians as a matter of policy. The 1949 Geneva convention explicitly broadened this provision. That means neither soldiers or U.S. Senators are allowed to sneak into downtown Belgrade in the dark of night and bump off innocent civilians, leaving notes pinned to their shirts saying they did it in order to get Milosevic to agree to Madeleine Albright’s demands. You can’t DO THAT, even with the best of intentions, and you can’t bomb them from 15,000 feet either. Just because he is a very religious Jew, who will not vote to kill civilians on Jewish holidays, does not mean that Lieberman can rationalize the killing of civilians on any day of the week. Now does it?

P.S. I notice he supports another brilliant idea on how to get at Milosevic -- Internet terror!! In order to prevent the people of Yugoslavia from communicating with the world and with each other on the world wide web, Lieberman thinks it would be neat if we assigned some hackers to worm their way into their system and make it inoperable. Now I know I might get into trouble for mixing church and state, Tony, but did you ever hear the Bible story of David and Goliath. Goliath was this GIANT, who was terrorizing Jewish people. He had taken away all their tanks and guns and airplanes and so was feeling pretty secure. But this little David got himself a slingshot and a stone and crept up on Goliath and whizzz, cracked him between the eyes and it was all over for the big guy. In other words, does it ever occur to the Senator how many little guys are out their on the Internet with slingshots?

Here is another...

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/09/091529.php

In 1937, Adolph Hitler's Luftwaffe indiscriminately bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, killing 1,650 civilians. The New York Times reported, "The object of the bombardment seemingly was demoralization of the civilian population....not a military objective." Soon after, America rightfully denounced the bombing as a "monstrous crime."

But this wasn't the first time anybody had bombed civilians. The French, Germans, and British had all partaken in limited civilian bombings in World War I — killing thousands.

In 1925, France and Spain defeated a Berber uprising in Morocco by use of civilian bombings. American volunteers, under French command, bombed the city of Chechaouen, similar in size to Guernica. And from 1926 through 1928, the US Marines utilized civilian bombing to force regime change in Nicaragua. There was no public outcry within the United States for either of these actions. For some reason, these were not considered crimes.

But when Japan bombed civilians in Shanghai in 1932 and claimed thousands of lives, the New York Times reported that those bombings brought a "literal avalanche of denunciation" upon Japan (and rightfully so!) In fact, it is said that the Shanghai bombing caused Americans "to view the Japanese as 'butchers' and 'murderers'." And again in 1937, when Japan again bombed Shanghai, the bombing was viewed correctly by Americans as "an atrocity of the most appalling kind."

In 1938, as a result of all of these civilian massacres (and others), the League of Nations unanimously passed a resolution outlawing "the intentional bombing of civilian populations." In 1939, nearing the outbreak of World War II, FDR made a public plea that the warring parties refrain from the "inhuman barbarism" of bombing civilian populations, acts which "sicken[ed] the hearts of every civilized man and woman," and "profoundly shock[ed] the conscience of humanity." As a result, Hitler pledged he would limit his air force to attacking only military targets. And British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stated that "Britain will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for the purpose of mere terrorism."

In 1940, however, the British War Cabinet approved plans for "indiscriminate" bombing of civilian German targets even before the Germans had ever bombed British civilians. But Hitler drew first blood with the bombing of British civilians in August of 1940. Then, in a series of back-and-forths, the Germans and British exchanged civilian bombings in the cities of Munich, Coventry, Mannheim, and London.

By July of 1941, Winston Churchill wrote, "There is one thing that will bring [Hitler] down, and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland." (Emphasis Added.) Soon enough, the British exterminated 42,000 people in Hamburg.

It wasn't until 1945 that the United States broke its oath to refrain from the bombing of civilians. With the protest of General Doolittle who went so far as to claim that such a course of conduct would amount to "terrorism," America went ahead with civilian bombings in Berlin. Then Dresden (killing approximately 60,000 civilians). Meanwhile, in the Pacific theater of the war, the US military brass decided that precision bombing of Japanese military targets was having limited success. Thus, tactics were changed.

Between November of 1944 and August of 1945, 160,000 tons of ordinance was dropped on 64 Japanese cities. 83,000 were killed in Tokyo alone! The Japanese condemned the American bombings of civilians (and rightfully so!).

August 6 will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, 70,000 lives were taken in the blink of an eye-- almost all were civilians, including a score of American prisoners of war held captive there. Within a few days of the bombing, 90,000 were dead. And the final count is put at about 200,000.

On August 9, 1945, another atomic bomb was dropped, this time on Nagasaki. This second bomb killed about 75,000 people.

While we most certainly must assign guilt to the then-fascist governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan for the indiscriminate killings of civilians, we must also hold the United States and Great Britain accountable. After all, by the end of the war, more than 1 million German and Japanese civlians had been killed, and another 7 million Germans and 8 million Japanese had been bombed out of their homes. Of these victims, it is estimated that twenty percent were children.

Before the outbreak of WWII, America was morally justifiable in its condemnation of the Guernica terror bombings of Spanish civilians. Unfortunately however, within years the US itself had perfected the terror on a much grander scale. Therefore, while Americans rightfully object to the failure of the Japanese to apologize to China for its war crimes or to cite them in the historical record taught to Japanese schoolchildren, Americans should not gloss over their nation's own attendance to terror bombings in WWII (and beyond!).

In fact, the failure of our society to recognize these faults may have impaired our own moral vision to the point where we confuse our reckless interventions abroad as noble and morally righteous endeavors. Perhaps many of our fellow citizens fail to pay sufficient attention to the fact that we too have exterminated hundreds of thousands of civilians, be they Japanese, German, Vietnamese, Panamanian, or Iraqi. How could we still be so outraged by civilian attacks when we participate in such attacks in places like Nagasaki, Fallujah, or My Lai? How could we still be so outraged by barbarism when we participate in it?

Civilians are civilians.