In challenging HuffingtonPost readers to respond to his logic, Dershowitz appears oblivious to the racist element in his thinking, that killing large numbers of Muslim civilians to eliminate a few of Israel's enemies is justifiable. If the situation were reversed - armed Muslims slaying large numbers of Israeli civilians to get at a few Israeli leaders - Dershowitz would surely call the killings acts of terrorism or even genocide.
9/11 Logic
Osama bin-Laden justified the 9/11 attacks, which involved the murders of nearly 3,000 civilians, as a way to attack the military and financial centers of the United States, the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers.
If, however, civilian deaths are wildly disproportionate to the military target, the attack could constitute terrorism, say, the destruction of a residential high-rise or some other civilian building to kill a couple of enemy targets.
In that sense, one could argue that George W. Bush acted as a terrorist at the start of the Iraq War when he ordered U.S. military aircraft to blow up a residential restaurant in Baghdad based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein might be eating there.
Though Hussein wasn't present, 14 civilians, including seven children, died. One mother collapsed when her headless daughter was pulled from the wreckage.
Similarly, during the Israeli fight for independence, Zionist extremists, including later national leaders Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were members of terrorist groups that attacked Palestinian civilians and British authorities. In one famous case, Jerusalem's King David Hotel, where British officials and other foreigners lived, was blown up.
But many Americans have come to regard terrorism as a strictly Muslim phenomenon. They hold that view despite well-known evidence to the contrary in large part because neoconservatives and other politically powerful forces drum this false idea into the heads of the U.S. population.
Cheney Speech
Take, for example, the speech that Vice President Dick Cheney gave to the same AIPAC conference at which Gillerman wondered whether or not "all Muslims are terrorists." Cheney substantively agreed that terrorism was almost exclusively a Muslim tactic - one that flourished because it didn't draw a sufficiently harsh U.S. response.
"Over the last several decades, Americans have seen how the terrorists pursue their objectives," Cheney said. "Simply stated, they would hit us, but we would not hit back hard enough.
"In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 Americans, and afterward U.S. forces withdrew from Beirut. In 1993 we had the killing of American soldiers in Mogadishu, and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Then came the attack on the Saudi National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995; the killings at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and, of course, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000."
However, Cheney's one-sided recounting of history reflected an anti-Muslim bias on two levels. First, it ignored the long history of terrorism practiced around the world by people of nearly all religions and ethnic backgrounds.
In 1976, for instance, Chile's U.S.-backed dictatorship sponsored a terrorist bombing on the streets of Washington, killing Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, yet then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush protected Chile's leaders from exposure and prosecution. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
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