Collateral

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The number of civilians killed in U.S. post-9/11 wars is more than four hundred thirty-two thousand.

Two million civilians died in the Vietnam War. One and one-half million in the Korean War. In World War II, thirty-eight million. Six million of those last were Jews, whose genocide led to the establishment of the Jewish state, Israel.

The Israel-Hamas War may have taken as many as nineteen thousand Palestinian civilians, if you can simultaneously believe both sides’ accounts.

Israel’s been hauled before the International Court of Justice after an allegation by South Africa that it is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in its war against Hamas. So far nobody has suggested that the leaders of Hamas — whose founding charter openly calls for genocide against Israelis, and in fact any Jew that can be found anywhere else — be called before any court.

I wonder why.

The author, neuroscientist, and philosopher Sam Harris, whom I’ve called on before to unravel this sort of knot, wonders too, and I wish everyone with a moral compass, and everyone without one, would hear him out, on “5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza.”