Hillel Neuer of The Times of Israel has it right when he says the State Department was "left dumbstruck" when asked why the language is different when the U.S. accidentally bombs civilians while Israel is condemned by the Obama administration for the same actions.
Neuer is specifically referring to a statement made by the administration last year calling Israel's accidental shelling of a school in Gaza while fighting Hamas "appalling" and "disgraceful." He then notes the very different tone when referring to the accidental U.S. shelling this last weekend of the Doctors Without Borders charity hospital in Afghanistan, calling it "tragic."
Associated Press correspondent Matt Lee picked up on this hypocrisy and executed a bit of professional journalism by directly confronting DoS deputy spokesperson Mark Toner in asking if the Obama administration has changed its standards. Lee said:
What I’m most curious about, is that this statement said the suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes, which — and the military has said that it was called in because the Afghans asked for it. But MSF says that they had been given the coordinates much in the same way the IDF had been given the coordinates of the school in Rafah. So the question is – and I realize this is under investigation. But the question is if – the question is: If the suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes on a humanitarian facility for which the coordinates had been given, that it seems to have changed.
Toner never could quite wrap a succinct answer around this question, only bumbling on about "the facts are still emerging" or "we'll let those investigations run their course." Toner added that the "bombing was, uh, not intentional."
Neuer complained that the State Department "requested a basic courtesy that it would not grant Israel" when Toner said to Lee, "So you’ll hopefully, uh, give me a pass if we wait for the investigation to run its course."
Neuer further writes:
Perhaps next time the State Department will apply the same common sense approach to Israel’s fight against Islamist terrorists that it applies to that of its own military.
Writing for National Review, David French weighed in on the matter as well:
No one has made any credible allegations that American pilots decided to destroy a hospital out of sheer malice — using combat in the city as pretext for mass murder. And unless that evidence is uncovered, the Taliban bear the blame for that tragic loss of life. Any argument to the contrary turns the law of war upside down. Out of sheer spite, the Obama administration has played that game with Israel. If it plays that game with American forces, then we can’t hope to effectively resist the Taliban, ISIS, or any other jihadist force.
