A Congressman Just Compared Killing Palestinians to ‘Mowing the Grass’
Website Breaking Defense helps Doug Lamborn advocate murder
One of the most popular military trade publications in the United States just published an op-ed by Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, calling on Americans to quit complaining and back Israel as it pursues a strategy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza.
“Mowing the grass,” of course, is a metaphor for periodic, bloody Israeli assaults on Palestinian communities. The Jewish state’s current air and ground campaign in Gaza has killed around 1,000 Palestinians—civilians, mostly—at the cost of several dozen Israeli lives.
The banner photo, courtesy of Wikipedia, depicts a Palestinian victim of the fighting.
Full disclosure—I was a founding contributor, several years ago, of the site that became Breaking Defense. But I strongly object to any publication that would give Lamborn a platform to justify killing innocent men, women and children.
Coloradans should kick Lamborn out of office at the first opportunity. And unless Breaking Defense quickly rebuts Lamborn’s op-ed, everyone else should consider boycotting the site. Don’t ever click through to it. Starve it of the hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors it needs to survive so that it can’t continue amplifying murderous pleas like Lamborn’s.
“Israel has been grappling with … existential threats since its very birth,” Lamborn writes, apparently mistaking Palestinian short-range rockets, which have killed a handful of Israelis in recent years, for civilization-ending nuclear weapons.
“With no foreseeable resolution of the conflict, Israel has developed a strategy to manage the conflict,” Lamborn continues. “The strategy changes the aim from eradicating the enemy to one of debilitating the enemy’s military capabilities. This is achieved by targeting the enemy’s leadership and destroying its weapons.”
“Israeli strategic think tanks, such as Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, have dubbed this strategy ‘mowing the grass,’” Lamborn explains.
But Israeli air strikes and ground attacks on Gaza overwhelmingly have struck civilians, killing scores every day for weeks. The “strategy” Lamborn advocates is, he admits, “not the clean solution we would hope for.”
And what would a “clean” solution be, in Lamborn’s estimation? The genocide of all Palestinians, the vast majority of whom only want to care for their families?
Lamborn, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who strongly supports America’s funding of the Israeli military, insists a permanent siege of Palestine is better than exposing any Israelis to any risk ever—even if that means depriving millions of people of statehood and basic services and occasionally killing a few hundred or thousand of them.
“Until the day the Arab population in Gaza decides to disengage from violence and cease to support terrorism, they will continue to suffer from Israel’s justified retaliations,” Lamborn writes.
Never mind that retaliation begets retaliation begets retaliation, etc. Lamborn’s strategy for peace in fact guarantees war. If he doesn’t understand that, he doesn’t belong in Congress.
There are alternatives to endless violence—Palestinian statehood being a good starting point. And there are enough alternative sources of military news that we don’t need Breaking Defense … if reading Breaking Defense also means legitimizing Lamborn’s hate.
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