Another Mad Bombing In Israel

An explosion near a shopping centre in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya has caused at least 10 casualties, Israeli emergency workers say.

For more details: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news

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I post this not as news, but as a basis for a conceptual point. The bombings of innocent civilians wherever are criminal acts. To glorify them with romanticized language (i.e. 'terrorist bombing') inflates the action as though it were an heroic gesture.

'Suicide bombing' is just plain sick and those who induce young men (and women) to carry out such acts should be put away for life -- how callously cruel.

The Fox News flip to 'homicide bomber', which was originated by one of my Yale classmates visiting Israel who passed it to Israeli information officers there from which it was picked up the next day by the White House with Fox News as usual in its wake, does not do it either.

My son suggested the other day a term that really fits -- 'mad bomber' with its explicit indications of insanity, which I think is the appropriate way to characterize such actions. I shall use this term from now on and recommend it to others. Needless to say group madness (folie a deux writ large) is not an uncommon phenomenon. The Jim Jones massacre was an American cult offshoot among many that we Americans have spawned. The current Muslim deviation should be placed in the same category of insanity as all the rest -- wherever and whatever their rationales.

And lest we are tempted to play holier than thou, our Western nations have done far worse with murderous mass bombings ranging from the London Blitz to the retaliatory fire and nuclear bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki -- and our daisy cutters in Afghanistan and Shock and Awe inflicted upon Iraq.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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