Via Judith, Senators Seek Curb on Cluster Bombs: Feinstein, Leahy Move After Israeli Strikes
The two Democratic lawmakers, members of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, identified Israel’s use of cluster bombs in Lebanon as an “example” or a “factor” in proposing the amendment. “The recent experience in Lebanon is only the latest example of the appalling human toll of injury and death,” Leahy said in a joint September 5 press release issued with Feinstein.
The article states that the Senators want the Pentagon to ensure that “such bombs do not jeopardize civilians”.
And I ask, where in the Cluster Munitions Amendment is there a condemnation of Hezbollah’s decades-long use of shrapnel-charged katyusha rockets carrying 22 lbs of TNT? Because the weapons Feinstein and Leahy want to curb are what’s effective against those katysha missiles launchers (h/t LGF) which are meant to kill civilians – Israeli civilians.
Read Michael Totten, Senators, he’s been there (emphasis added):
Here’s the thing, though. Hezbollah hit a little of everything in Northern Israel: houses, trees, streams, grass, apartments, roads, vineyards, and cows. Thousands of rockets crashed and sprayed shrapnel inside their shooting gallery. The odds that none of the rockets would hit a single IDF soldier were microscopic. Hezbollah couldn’t have achieved zero Israeli military casualties no matter how hard they tried unless they didn’t fire those rockets at all.
I was far safer on military bases, in open fields, and on tiny kibbutzes than in cities during Hezbollah’s terror war. Katyushas are nearly useless against an army but are devastatingly effective as terrorist weapons against civilian population centers even as they cause relatively light damage. Shrapnel may not hurt your apartment building too bad, but it will tear you to pieces if you’re in the way.
On a related subject, will the Cluster Munitions Ammendment say anything about the usual suicide-bomber choice of explosives, where the vest is loaded with ball-bearings that have been covered with rat poison so the civilians they wound would bleed to death?
(technorati tags Hezbollah, Israel, Terrorism, Lebanon, katyusha rockets, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Michael Totten)
Feinstein, et al, have found a way to appease and appeal to the left, with out engaging in outright anti semitism.
They have joined the ‘beat Israel; crowd, by demanding from Israel what they do not demand from any other nation.
They win, because no one will call them what they really are- political opportunists that will do anything, even engage in racism, to trade for votes.