Israel is at fault again

I have been hearing two of the same old stupid arguments again concerning the attacks upon Israel. The missiles being launched at Israel are relatively ineffective. Yet the Israeli response has been violent and far out of proportion. Yes the missiles are not very effective. Many are shot down and many fall in places where no harm is done. Yet these facts are not in any way connected to which side started the shooting or who is at ‘fault’. (Shooting first is justified in some cases, but is generally a sign of the aggressor.) I am guessing that the logic is that if you are good at something, then you like to do it more often than those who are not. Israel is much better at waging war than their attackers, so they are warmongers. This is fifth grade logic being applied to a graduate level discussion. Artillery bombardments have many misses. Even with today’s precision instruments, literally tons of shells can land in spaces that do no damage to the target. The intent is usually very clear. Just because you can build fortifications than can minimize the damage does not make you the attacker. The ability to shoot down missiles that are bombarding you makes you more effective in defense, not the attacker. Then we have the issue of proportion. War is NOT proportional. They are won by the side that escalates to a level the other side either cannot or will not match. It has nothing to do with who started it or who is ‘right’. Actually, the Israeli response HAS been restrained. The IDF has far more capability to wage war than what they are using today. No ground assault has been launched. (YET) Most of the IDF is sitting idle in prepared positions. No nuclear weapons have been used. Nuclear weapons are a last resort, and it has been demonstrated time and again that Israel is not going to use them in situations like this. The government of Turkey made a statement yesterday (11/20/12) that pointed out that Israel was deliberately attempting to kill civilians and is targeting them. Turkey’s capabilities must be miniscule, because if Israel was attempting to do this, we would be seeing tens of thousands of dead, every day. An Israeli division has enough firepower to kill hundreds of people in well under an hour. Multiply this with airpower and simple math will tell you that Israel is being so restrained that barely any resources are actually in use. My favorite of the most stupid arguments: The Arabs are taking far more losses than Israel. As if the losses one side takes in a conflict have anything to do with who started it or who is to blame for the conflict in the first place. The best example I can think of is that Japan attacked the United States in 1941. When it was over, we had lost something like 40,000 dead and a couple hundred thousand wounded. We killed millions of Japanese, many of them civilians. The two nuclear attacks killed far more Japanese than we lost in the entire war, and they were ALL civilians. And this makes us the ones who started it? We are the ones who are to blame for the conflict? Are you mad? No, it makes you prejudiced and/or uninformed. The presses (News reporters) have about a 5th or 6th grade level of understanding of warfare. Analysis is almost entirely worthless, if not misleading. I have seen this in reports from ALL the wars that I have studied since the inception of the printing press. We are seeing it again today.