"NOTED" ? :

Barbarism Runs Rampant in the Holy Land : Atrocities are now a tactic accepted by both sides. (Hussein Ibish, July 24, 2002 , LA Times)

The latest atrocity in the Middle East, in which an Israeli F-16 jet fired a missile into a civilian neighborhood in Gaza in a successful attempt to kill a noted Palestinian, is emblematic of the degree of barbarism that has come to characterize this hideous conflict. Inevitably and predictably, the attack took the lives of many innocents, including at least nine children, two of them infants.

Personally, I believe Israel may have acted against its own best interest in conducting this operation at just this moment in time. But let's call a spade a spade. Salah Shehada was murdering scum and richly deserved to die. "Noted"? What kind of value-neutral label is that? The kind of moral equivalence that Mr. Ibish uses here--comparing a targeted assassination of a terrorist, which accidentally killed some of the civilians among whom he hid himself, to that terrorist own intentional murdering of civilians--reflects poorly on his own cause and makes it near impossible to take him seriously.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2002 10:21 AM