Blaming the victim to excuse civilian casualties

ON August 29 we learned from your letters page that Hezbollah launched missiles from apartment blocks (Prof. Michael Wald), even though it would not be possible to do so without blowing massive holes in them, and that Hezbollah deliberately prevented Lebanese civilians from leaving villages and fired missiles from hospitals (Gene Cahill), though there is no evidence of this.

Indeed anyone with a shred of sense would realise that Hezbollah would soon lose their massive support had they actually resorted to these tactics.

These untruths would not be worth replying to, except that they are written to justify what Amnesty International has called the deliberate Israeli attack on civilian targets. If Hezbollah fired missiles from hospitals, Israel is justified in bombing hospitals. If people only stay in their villages because they are forced to do so, then it can’t be the Israelis’ fault that they kill — sorry, collaterally damage — these civilians. This strategy of blaming the victim is deployed not only to justify past crimes, but also to justify future attacks on them. But the most disturbing letter of all that day was from Herbert Stark who demanded that the Israeli army goes back to ‘finish the job’.