by | July 12, 2024
John Spencer served in the US Army for twenty-five years, including two tours in Iraq. Since then he been a Professor of Urban Warfare at West Point. Recognized as an expert in his field, John Spencer has become more widely known for his recent writings on the IDF’s conduct of its war against Hamas in Gaza. His latest posting on the subject can be found here: “‘Israel is measured by double and triple standards,’ does more than anyone to prevent civilian harm, US warfare expert says,” All Israel News, June 27, 2024:
“Israel is being measured by double and triple standards” in its fighting in Gaza, a standard “that does not exist anywhere in the world,” said John Spencer, head of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, at a recent “War Room” briefing in collaboration with the Jerusalem Institute for Public and State Affairs (JCPA).
Spencer, the world-renowned urban warfare who served for 25 years as an infantry soldier and did two tours in Iraq, has publicly and repeatedly defended and praised the Israel Defense Forces’ performance during the Gaza War in recent months.
“The IDF uses tactics that no army has ever seen to prevent harm to civilians and still fulfill its mission,” Spencer told the JCPA after visiting the soldiers of the IDF’s 98th Division in the field.
He also stridently rejected international accusations that Israel was using starvation as a weapon, bombing indiscriminately or committing genocide.
“It’s all a lie,” Spencer declared, noting that if the standards currently applied to Israel were applied to Western countries in the future, it would make anti-terror warfare almost impossible.
Such standards include requiring the massive evacuation of a population before entering an area, not using heavy “bunker-buster” bombs to reach enemies hidden away underground, and the demand to prevent any and all civilian casualties.
“It’s impossible and unimaginable,” Spencer stressed….
“This imaginary standard of zero civilian casualties in a war where Israel is required to meet a new standard is very problematic,” Spencer emphasized.
He has made this point repeatedly over the past months. In an article in Newsweek in March, Spencer brought up the IDF’s operation at Al-Shifa Hospital as an example of the lengths the army goes to prevent civilian harm in Gaza.
“Israeli media reported that doctors accompanied the forces to help Palestinian patients if needed. They were also reported to be carrying food, water and medical supplies for the civilians inside,” Spencer wrote.
“None of this meant anything to Israel’s critics, of course, who immediately pounced. The critics, as usual, didn’t call out Hamas for using protected facilities like hospitals for its military activity.”
One more statistic, that is not included in this piece by Spencer, but that he has provided in many of his other articles on the Gaza war, tells us as a great deal about the IDF’s solicitude for the lives of civilians. This is the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths. The UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, the average ratio was 9:1, or nine civilian deaths for every combatant death. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to reduce that ratio to 4:1, and in Iraq to 3:1. But no army in the world has come close to what the IDF has achieved in Gaza.
Hamas has claimed 38,000 dead, without providing separate figures for civilians and Hamas combatants. The IDF now says it has killed 17,000 operatives — and that is without counting those members of Hamas who were killed when the rubble of bombed buildings landed on top of them. That would mean 21,000 civilian deaths. From that number we have to subtract the 800 Gazans who die each month of natural causes; over eight months that figure would account for 6400 civilian deaths. That brings the total number of civilian deaths to 14,600. How many of those 14,600 civilians were killed not by the IDF, but by the estimated 20% of Hamas rockets that fell inside Gaza?
A most conservative estimate would be 200 a month, or 1,600 over the first eight months of the war. That brings down the number of civilians killed by Israeli fire to 13,000, while the number of combatant deaths so far is 17,000. The civilian-to-combatant ratio in Gaza is thus 13:17, which is less than 1:1 – a ratio unheard of, as Professor Spencer has said, in the annals of modern warfare.
LIZ-
No “almost” about it. They don’t…a looong sordid tale of woe for Jews.
Except on one place ..Wall Street Financial Houses…………!!!
This incisive article by Gatestone may give us a clue as to what’s really going on:
What makes terrorism so terrifying is that it does not distinguish between military and civilian populations. Hamas intentionally uses its own civilian populations as human weapons of war, and then accuses Israel of commiting genocide against “innocent” civilians! It is psychological warfare designed to neutralize Israeli soldiers, and informational warfare designed to foment worldwide antisemitism.
Any factual media coverage of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza War would come to the same conclusion as Professor Spencer, but there is no factual coverage. Why not? Because the globalist elite who own the mainstream media are in a temporary alliance of convenience with the Iranians and the Chinese, all in common cause to destroy the Judeo-Christian tradition which supports nationalism. First comes Saturday (Israel/Jews), then comes Sunday (US/Christians) We are in a world war whether people recognize it or not: Globalism v. Nationalism.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is the infrastructure of western civilization that supports individualism and individual sovereignty. The globalist enemies of freedom are collectivists who see the Judeo-Christian tradition as a competing ideology that must be destroyed. Ultimately, the western globalist elite will necessarily battle the communist alliance for supremacy. But make no mistake, east or west, whichever side prevails in this war for world domination, will eliminate any national sovereignty, individual sovereignty, and any freedom whatsoever. The “winner” will impose its own binary sociopolitical infrastructure of rulers and ruled. It is back to the future of 21st-century feudalism on a planetary scale.
The antisemitism being fomnented worldwide is a weapon of war designed to create divisiveness between Jews and Christians in order to weaken the Judeo-Christian tradition worldwide. Jews and Christians must unite worldwide in common cause to oppose globalism’s war on human freedom, and to preserve their national and individual sovereignty.
The big lie of collectivism, whether socialism, communism, feudalism, or globalism, is the big lie of omission. Every collectivist society promises equality and social justice, but conveniently omits the essential detail that every collectivist society is also a binary society of rulers and ruled. There is no private property, no middle class, no upward mobility, and no freedom in the planned 21st-century planetary Unistate. It doesn’t matter whether it is Klaus Schwab or Xi Jinping, the elite always and only take care of the elite.
It’s almost as though the world doesn’t quite hold Jews in the same esteem as other human beings – as though the Jewish people, including Israelis, are seen as “less than”. Behaving in an extra specially good way merely moves them up to the same level as other people. I don’t think the world consciously holds this belief, although many Muslims do, but it’s an unconscious form of antisemitism that is deeply pernicious.