Israel’s three-week-old offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon has killed more than 900 people and wounded 3,000, with a third of the casualties children under 12, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said Thursday.

Siniora, in a video message to a summit of leaders of the Muslim world, added that a quarter of the population, or one million people, had been displaced. ~Haaretz

It might be worth noting something.  When half a million Muslims in Darfur are forcibly displaced by other Muslims, everyone and his brother, particularly The New Republic, calls it genocide and quite a few demand international action.  “Never again!” the boys at TNR yell at us.  When possibly as many as one million Lebanese are forcibly displaced for the sake Israel’s “self-defense” in a war that crosses international lines?  Suddenly it it not only not anything remotely close to genocide, nor is international intervention required, but it is good, it is right, it is necessary, and the consequences be damned. 

I suppose I can’t really blame TNR for not taking Israel to task: Israel is a state of which they approve, which means by definition that it cannot do anything sufficiently unjust to merit real condemnation; the Sudan is just some tin-pot Islamist basketcase of a country that no one likes anyway, so it is much easier to get into high dudgeon about how it handles its internal affairs.   But pardon me if I don’t take seriously anything such people say about human rights, international law or morality.