There are people out there who are so profoundly soulless that they will say just about anything to get attention. No matter how stupid and depraved, they are willing to launch any attack. The attempt by Hamas earlier in the week to cause a large scale breach of the fence line separating Gaza and Israel brought a lot of this out.

Some 62 people were killed by Israeli forces. This resulted in the US media portraying it as a massacre of some sorts and a UN hearing where the perpetrators of the violence were cast as the victims.

That was not the case.

If 50 of the 62 people killed on Monday were Hamas and three have been claimed by Islamic Jihad, that means 85% of the dead were terror operatives. While even one civilian inadvertently killed is one too many, the notion that the IDF "fired indiscriminately" is a libelous lie.

— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) May 16, 2018

But you get idiotic stuff like this.

I condemn the deaths of all civilians. But they have to actually die first, and there have been zero Israeli casualties. https://t.co/8yl2mYV8LN

— Sulome (@SulomeAnderson) May 14, 2018

Apparently, the action was illegitimate because no Israelis were killed.

Carried to its illogical conclusion, it looks like this. Damon Linker is a particularly odious piece of work and this Twitter thread shows why. This is how it starts.

When people on both sides die, it’s a battle. When people on only one side die, it’s a massacre. Even when Jews do it. https://t.co/895X4hc59f

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 16, 2018

Actually, no.

This is what happens when you send a rabble of armed half-wits into battle against a professional military force occupying prepared positions. The idea that you owe the enemy deaths of your own soldiers in order to legitimize your destruction of the enemy is truly disgusting.

But it gets better.

1. This tweet of mine has proven … controversial on here today. That's fine. But for the sake of clarity, a few points. https://t.co/kmZRdWHK3R

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

Not controversial. Obscene is a better description.

2. I am a Zionist. Israel has as much right to exist as any other nation on the planet, and hence just as much right to defend itself against threats.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

I’m also sure a lot of your best friends are black folks.

3. The problem is its assessment of the threats it faces. In the 45 years since the Yom Kippur War, a lot has changed – most importantly, Israel's strength relative to its nation-state neighbors and the stateless Palestinians.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

Why stateless? Because repeated offers that would have created a Palestinian state have been refused by…wait for it…Palestinian leadership.

4. Israel today is massively more powerful than everyone around. This was last seriously tested during the Second Intifada, when suicide bombers repeatedly struck and killed Israelis on busses and in restaurants and cafes, across the country.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

This, by inference, was fair as there were dead on both sides. This is what fairness looks like:

5. In response, Israel built the wall and struck back hard. Estimates put the total number dead in the vicinity of 1,000 on the Israeli side and 3,000 on the Palestinian side.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

6. The result? Large-scale acts of terror are now quite rare.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

7. This was tested on a smaller scale when Hamas forces in Gaza launched primitive rocket attacks against southern Israel.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

8. No country would permit such a thing, and so Israel struck back, pummeling Gaza into the submission in which its inhabitants have been forced to live ever since. https://t.co/XghmRgAS6e

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

9. Around 2,200 Gazans were killed and 10,700 injured. On the Israeli side? 66 soldiers and 5 civilians were killed and 469 IDF soldiers and 261 civilians were injured.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

10. Those figures are quite lopsided. But that's nothing compared with what happened on Monday at the border fence, when 62 Gazans were killed and well over a thousand injured with Israel suffering no significant casualties at all.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

I’d think of this as a feature, not a bug, and one should really recalibrate one’s moral compass when you are bitching about too few people and, in particular, too few Jews, being killed by terrorists.

11. Is that a "massacre," as I described it this morning? Since the term implies that the victims were innocent and there were Hamas fighters in the mix, perhaps not. But it certainly resembles a one-sided slaughter more than a battle between opposing armies.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

Linker should spend a few minutes and read about some of the tank battles in the First Gulf War where hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were killed and the only Coalition casualties were from friendly fire.

12. This should trouble people: Israelis, Americans, all people whose conscience hasn't been completely warped by tribalism.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

If being against terrorism makes one a tribalist, then we should all take joy in the name.

13. Israel is not weak. It doesn't face an existential threat from rock-, kite-, and Molotov-cocktail-wielding Gazans. How about more tear gas? Rubber bullets? Water canons? A 100-foot-deep line of razor wire behind the fence?

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

Factually, the border is defined by a razor wire barrier. Wire doesn’t defend itself. What do you do when the wire is cut as it was in numerous places? If the answer is “nothing,” then why bother building a fence. The Israelis did use tear gas. There are dozens of images of Israeli soldiers using rubber bullets. But you got me on the water cannon. Maybe if there were bountiful supplies of water in the f***ing desert they would have used them. Just spit-balling here. The very fact that several days of violent demonstrations resulted in the deaths of a maximum of 9 noncombatants should be a clue that this was not indiscriminate violence.

14. The population of Gaza is living under an Israeli boot heel. Yes, they've mostly brought it on themselves. But it's still a boot heel, and these protests are them squirming. And now Israel has stepped even harder on their throats.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

15. *Even if it's necessary*, even if there's currently no way out from the current impasse, no one should be strutting. No one should be feeling cocky or good about themselves.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

16. Monday was a bloodbath—and no, the agency doesn't lie entirely on the side of Hamas. Israel has agency. It makes choices, too, and on Monday its soldiers chose to shoot live rounds at well over 1,000 people who were not shooting at them.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

But this isn’t even true. We know, with some precision, that the overwhelming majority of those killed were actually armed members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It increasingly looks like the dead civilians were being used as human shields. If so, the blame for their deaths does not lie with the Israelis, but rather with the people who, against the laws of war, used civilians for that purpose.

17. Other courses of action were possible, but Israel chose *this* path over others, and the Trump administration cheered it on. That should trouble people—in the same way that dropping atom bombs on city centers should trouble people.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

I am speechless. What kind of an amoral cretin can compare Hiroshima to Gaza or doubt that fewer people were killed for having forced Japan to surrender? And all of this because, well, Trump.

18. If Israel isn't careful, it will end up committing acts that will look even more like massacres than this horrible event. To keep that from happening, it needs its true friends to hold it to higher standards. #endit

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 17, 2018

Israel has been accused of this by people like Linker since it declared independence. It will continue to be so accused. No matter the facts, Linker and his ilk will blame Israel because it is fashionable and gains the approval of the right people. Because he’d much rather pretend to mourn dead Jews than to see them defend themselves.