Sometimes I get on a roll when commenting on The Pirate’s Cove. In response to the commenter styling himself Elwood P Dowd, I ranted:

The very good and noble Mr Dowd wrote:

Yes, everyone makes mistakes. Mr Teach was celebrating the deaths of two evil men while ignoring burning alive as many as 50 children, women and men.

Those “two evil men” weren’t brave soldiers on the battlefield, nobly resisting the advancing Israeli soldiers, but cowards who started a fight they couldn’t finish, hiding amongst the (purportedly) innocent children. How many ‘innocent’ Germans were killed as the Allies closed the noose on Germany, seeking to capture or kill Adolf Hitler and his henchmen? How many ‘innocent’ Japanese were burned to death in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, as the US softened up the country in preparation for invasion?

War is Hell on earth, but no one here argues that the war to defeat the Axis was wrong or unnecessary; we just didn’t have ubiquitous cameras and YouTube and TikTok and Twitter to capture and disseminate the images of all of that to shocked civilians in the West.

Mr Dowd and his Fellow Travellers would allow the Hamas terrorists to make quick forays into Israel, to murder, kidnap, and rape innocent Jews, and then quickly retreat to hide amongst ‘innocent’ civilian populations, populations which have proved to be willing to shelter the terrorists, untouched and untouchable, because it’s just wrong to bring war to the larger civilian population. Even our sympathetic soul from St Louis has admitted that Hamas must be destroyed, but he quivers and quakes at what is necessary to destroy them.

War is Hell on earth, but Hamas are no different from any other army, organized or guerrilla, which depend upon the support and cooperation of the larger, surrounding civilian population.

On their most gracious days, American conservatives equate Muslims with 3/5th of a non-Muslim.

We’re all a little bit too young to have seen the American propaganda posters of the Japanese Yellow Horde or the rapacious Germans, but of course we demonized our enemies. The Germans were good Christians, primarily Lutherans and Catholics, but they were still supporting the Wehrmacht in the field, producing the weapons and ammunition, the uniforms and boots, the food and the fuel and the trucks and the tanks and the airplanes used by the Heer and the Luftwaffe to invade and kill and conquer and occupy Poland and France and the USSR. We shed few tears for the 8-and 12-year-olds who were blown to smithereens by bombs dropped from B-17s and B-29s in massive attacks to destroy munitions factories and rail yards and power plants, to weaken Germany’s and Japan’s war effort, because we understood that bombs dropped hit all around the vicinity of those targets as well as the targets only.

We have somehow become persuaded that only the actual soldiers can be legitimately targeted, and all of the surrounding civilians are just innocent bystanders, but that’s just ignorance.