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PROPORTIONS

                                             November 25, 2006

     As I was saying in
     BELOW_THE_FOLD

     Since then Israel
     has gotten hit in return,
     but the levels of civilian
     casualties are running at
     dozens of Israelies to
     hundreds of Lebanese...                 PROPORTIONS


          But I really need to check those ratios,
          since it is of course, crucial to get
          the right figure.

          It would be terrible to accuse Israel of
          killing 10x as many innocents as Hezbollah,
          if really it were only 5x.
      
   I was just listening to a    
   Howard Zinn rap about the         Zinn's take is unremittingly
   state of the world,               cynical -- his presumption
   and he mentioned in passing       is that every single thing
   that wars have been getting       said by any government,
   worse as far as the ratio of      anywhere, is a complete lie.
   civilian-to-combantants     
   that are killed.                      He's so certain about it,
                                         he convinces me that this
                                         must be wrong -- or at
     War Casualties,                     least not quite right.
     Percent civilians                      
     (Howard Zinn):                          (For one thing: 
                                             is a government 
     WWI        10%                          something that can 
     WWII       50%                          know truth?)
     Vietnam    70%
     Since then 80% - 85%

       [ref]



                    A project for another day:

                    Research where Zinn gets his
                    casualty figures.

                       Look at the ratio throughout
                       the Israeli-Palestine saga.

                                                     Fisk as
                                                     initial
                                                     source?

                       Note the difficulties
                       of determining these
                       figures, e.g. contoversy
                       about Iraq, even *after*
                       study published in Lancet.


                             How did Marla's
                             project
                             go about it?




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