Imagine that I showed you a picture: corpses, men, women and children all piled up. A great heap of them, stacked like so much trash, limbs broken, eyes vacant, all about them the look of violent death.

Let me be so bold as to assume you would think this the evidence of a terrible crime, one no civilized nation could commit and no civilized man could countenance.

Suppose then that I showed you a picture of the piled casualties of the February 1945 bombing of Dresden;

No one disagrees that the bombing of Dresden was a terrible thing, but by the same token no one (well, no one serious) imagines that the Bombing was simply an act of opportunistic murder undertaken for the sake of bloodthirst. Serious people understand that moral clarity cannot come without an understanding of all of the facts.

Less then a month before Dresden was bombed the Auschwitz Death Camp had been liberated.  The horrors of  Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau would continue for weeks after Dresden. From September 1940 to May 1941 London and fifteen other British cities had faced bombardment by air, with tens of thousands of civilians killed. Dresden cannot be understood without Aushwitz and the Blitz of London, nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki without Pearl Harbor and Nanking. Put another way, you cannot look at the piled dead of Dresden without the memories of other images in mind…

It is the practice of the enemies of the West to deceive with half truths. As William F. Buckley observed,

To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.

Today more then ever the enemies of the West, and of Israel particularly, take every opportunity to tell the world that we ought to pay no attention to who is pushing the old lady out of the way of the bus and who is pushing her into the path of the bus. Today so many in the media, either through ignorance or malice, would have you believe that the conflict between the State of Israel and the Terrorist group Hamas that controls Gaza simply sprang from the ground, a fit of pique on the part of the Israelis.

For example, this imagine, chosen to accompany an Associated Press article;

A heart-wrenching albeit fascinating image. (As others have noted, it’s a curious thing that a small boy would be writing on a blackboard in the ruins of s school, even more so for a child that presumably speaks Arabic to be leaving graffiti in English. An uncharitable person would think the shot staged, but that would be silly…) But that picture, like so very many images and language choices made in covering the ongoing conflict in Gaza, is intended more to inflame then inform. To understand that picture, after all, one must understand it in the context of a broader set of images and statements, such as;

Israel is a pluralistic, western democracy locked in a struggle with nihilistic death cult, which freely and openly states that there can never be a peaceful resolution to the conflict. For all that, the IDF has engaged in the most restrained and merciful military actions in the history of modern (or, for that matter, ancient) warfare. Yet this is war, and no amount of care can prevent civilian casualties when one side seeks to armor their munitions with the bodies of their own children.  So Israel must continue, understanding what the British understood in World War II, as stated in the words of Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris (by way of Wikipedia);

I … assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

The IDF has a responsibility to do what it does because it must be done. It is incumbent on all who have the luxury of being informed second hand not to fall into the trap of half-truths being laid out to snare the goodhearted but under informed.