I haven't addressed the multiple calls by the pro-terrorist people for people like me to issue equal concern and or condemnation regarding dead Gazan civilians and children as I have with Israelis.
There are reasons.
The people making these calls and pretending that they're pointing out a double-standard, or somehow thinking that they're proving that the people on the side of Israel don't care about dead Muslim children, generally aren't worth talking to directly. They're either aggressive morons, or they're being consciously manipulative.
Still, it's worth discussing this broadly.
Even if we didn't know what we know about Hamas, there's a massive ethical difference between collateral damage and targeting civilians. The kind of person who is capable of pushing a button to launch a missile as a rocket launcher that's pointed in the direction of him and his family, with the knowledge that it is likely to kill a civilian in the process, is much different than the kind of person who can kill a baby in its crib with his bare hands.
But, we do know what we know about Hamas.
We know that ten to twenty percent of Hamas's rockets land in their own territory. So, a lot of these people are immediately attributing every Gazan death to Israel, when we know that a large portion of the casualties, including the hospital, we're the result of friendly fire.
We know about the use of human shields.
We all know what it says about one side of the conflict that shoots over the shoulders of their own children as a deterrent, and the other side that values the lives of her enemy's children enough to be deterred in the first place.
Of course, the children in Gaza are still innocent, and they shouldn't be deprived of the chance to grow up to become better people than their parents.
The reason why I don't treat all of these deaths equally is because the Israelis aren't taking fucking GoPro footage of themselves killing women and children and posing it on social media, or calling their parents to declare themselves heros for killing as many civilians as they have.
I also don't treat these situations as equal because I know that people are trying to manipulate this into a condemnation of Israel, and to try to get an accidental "gotcha" moment that reveals some kind of moral equivalence when none exists. That's while we all know that all of the Gazan blood that has been spilled is on the hands of Hamas.
Yes. All of it.