targeting civilians

I was recently watching C-SPAN's television show "Book TV" and the featured guest was Steve Emerson. He was hyping his book "Jihad Incorporated" and taking questions from viewers. He was describing evidence he had encountered suggesting that radical Islamic groups have military-style compounds set up all across rural America, that Palestine-based groups like Hamas were setting up operations to be carried out on American soil, etc. One of his callers brought up the fact that, like Hamas, the state of Israel deliberately targets civilians in Palestine and most openly in Israel's 2006 summer invasion of Lebanon. Emerson claimed that Israel does not deliberately target civilians, but any reading of current events says otherwise.

As described by one of the world's most respected organizations on human rights (Human Rights Watch, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/02/lebano13902.htm), Israel was constantly targetting civilians during their invasion of Lebanon (an invasion which was supposed to crush Hezbollah once and for all, but only ended up as an embarassing defeat for Israel's legendary military machine). Israel so commonly targets Palestinian civilians that the deaths occur in the double digits on a daily basis, yet they get away with it by claiming that their intended targets (usually some generic "terrorist leader", who can be anyone they say it is at any time) are hiding behind human shields, effectively forcing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to kill innocents in their pursuits. I guess it's too much to ask why Israeli forces don't hesitate at all to fire into crowds when they're only after one of two of them.

Outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan dutifully condemned Israel for its targetting of Lebanese civilians and their deliberate bombing of a UN headquarters (which resulted in four deaths of UN personnel), and he was predictably scolded by the Zionist Organization of America (http://www.zoa.org/2006/08/zoa_criticizes_30.htm) for his request that Israel respect human rights.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad are branded "terrorist" groups because they target civilians at times and they admit that they do. Israel targets civilians but is not condemned as a terrorist state because they say they don't not target civilians, and the West takes them at their word. Maybe if Islamic groups started claiming, like Israel, that they do not deliberately target civilians they can be taken off the US governments list of terrorist groups? Israel literally gets away with cold-blooded murder at their whim and I guess the US thinks that is just fine...