The question of whose life is worth more contains another question that is too frequently ignored: To whom?
Blinken predictably answered, “No.” And the top headline in the next day’s Jerusalem Post read, “Blinken: Jewish lives don’t matter more than Palestinian ones.”
Friedman’s question implicitly bought into a common moral fallacy — one fostered over the years by his own paper, the New York Times, with its front-page graphics comparing Palestinian and Israeli casualties in any Gazan conflict. That comparison is based on the presumption that the side that suffers the greater number of civilian casualties is morally superior.
And that, Friedman seems to think, is true even when one side has invested billions of dollars in anti-rocket defenses to protect its civilian population and the other deliberately maximizes its own civilian casualties by using its population as human shields for its military operations. By the Friedman/New York Times standard, Nazi Germany was the morally superior side in World War II because many more German civilians died than American or British civilians.
Friedman also engages in one of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes: Jews view non-Jews as subhumans, and as a consequence have no compunctions about killing or maiming them, whether by drawing blood for their Pesach matzos or by poisoning the wells.
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