Right off the top of my head, I watched film on TV which showed the Israeli military shoot and kill a 12 y/o Palestinian kid who was hiding with his unarmed Palestinian father behind a barrier in no-man's-land. This kid was clearly no threat to anyone, and the press said he hadn't been a threat, just caught in no-man's-land. The Israelis acknowledged they shot and killed him even after it was aware the kid was a non-combatant civilian and absolutely no threat.

Now, if that had been your kid, murdered, but by an Army, would you be feeling particularly charitable?

As for the history of the founding of Israel, you're on your own. It was founded by "terrorism", which if done in the name of "good guys" is "freedom fighting". Any history of Israel will describe a noble struggle, a large component of which was "terror".

Terrorism is an acknowledged form of warfare, one the Americans have worked on very hard. The WWII firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg in Germany, and Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya were directed against a civilian population with the goal of destroying the will to continue the war. As if the German public were going to have any more influence on that than the American public on energy policy.

Curtis LeMay: "When the conflagration finally burned out, 267,171 buildings had been destroyed and 83,000 people were dead - the highest death toll of any single day's action of the war, exceeding the number of deaths caused by the big Allied raids on Hamburg and Dresden, or the nuclear strike to come in August on Hiroshima. Millions of homeless found themselves facing an uncertain future with little or no food and clothing in the freezing cold."

LeMay, continued: " I was not happy, but neither was I particularly concerned, about civilian casualties on incendiary raids."

These were attacks against the civilian population, even though there was a uniformed army and clear battle lines.

One man's terrorism is the others freedom fighting, and no one, absolutely no one, can take the moral high road here.

To say that the Palestinians are fighting dirtier than the Israeli's, or the Israeli's have the moral high ground, or that terrorism is shunned by "civilized" countries is folly of a higher order.

Arf