By Deji Komolafe, Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Dan Senor, former Bush foreign policy advisor and co-author of a new book called "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World”, recently joined Fareed Zakaria on the latter s long running Sunday morning show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS.
Here is a transcript of their conversation regarding the ever growing death toll in the Israeli siege on Gaza, especially with regard to children.
ZAKARIA: How long -- if this campaign goes on for another month or two, more and more civilian casualties, will -- you know, the memory of the Hamas attack fades and the reality of pictures of Palestinians dying increases, how long do you think he has?
SENOR: It depends how he frames this. If President Biden frames this accurately that Hamas is responsible for Israeli civilian casualties and Palestinian civilian casualties, that the reason Palestinians are being killed is because Hamas has chosen to wage its offensive military capabilities in hospitals, in U.N. run schools, near mosques.
[10:45:04]
Israel doesn't get to choose and the U.S. doesn't get to choose where Hamas fights. Hamas chooses where it wants to fight and is deliberately choosing it. It would be like -- the analogy I recommend President Biden give is it would be as though Russia located a missile launcher next to a Russian orphanage and was firing at Ukraine, and Ukraine responded and accidentally killed the -- they took out the Ukrainian orphanage.
The U.S. wouldn't blame Ukraine for that. It would obviously be Putin's decision. It was a strategic decision. And, I think, President Biden needs to start framing things in those terms and -- then I think the American public's tolerance for the images coming out of Gaza will be, you know, higher.
Dan Senor’s response is truly instructive as it shows an unfortunate reality regarding the subjective value of human life in this conflict.
No amount of political engineering or public relations branding should ever compromise the humanity of ALL to call things exactly as they are. I am confident that the tolerance of the American people will never get higher for the gruesome images of babies, children and mothers being collectively slaughtered.
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