Humanitarian Intervention: The White Man's Burden?

This is why the humanitarian imperialist is so deeply offended when non-whites insolently usurp the humanitarian prerogative. Perhaps it is worse when there is an Iranian connection, because then it is necessary to ignore the fact that Iranians are not only white but (if the term has any legitimate meaning) Aryan. But ignorance conquers all, and these subtleties are lost on the good ole boys of the West (and the pseudo-West, i.e., Israel): The Iranians wear funny turbans. Hizballah leaders wear funny turbans. People who wear funny turbans aren't really white. So these guys aren't really white. Such are the joys of redneck logic. Yet the White Man's humanitarian burden could be Hizballah's burden as well.

Hizballah's raid on Israel may have sparked the current conflict in Lebanon, but it is also a very plausible case of humanitarian intervention. In the first place, it was apparently intended to help the Palestinians in the occupied territories, who certainly could use some help. For over thirty years they have been under Israel's tyranny - there is no other word for a government which holds (and generously exercises) the power of life and death over a population which has no voice whatever in that government. They are brutalized; they are malnourished; they are continually threatened by a settler movement resolved to take every inch of land from them. This bloody occupation is, according to many Israeli military men, of no strategic value, and it is clear that Israel would do much better to mind its own borders than to spread its forces all over the landscape in order to defend settler enclaves. So this is just plain tyranny, not self-defense, and Palestinian resistance is justified. If it is justified, so is Hizballah's attempt to support it.

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