Posted by
You can see it from here on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 8:07:34 PM
Israel has been attacked repeatedly by the terrorist groups in control of Gaza and now from Lebanon, and has
responded with muscle.
Hizbollah and Hamas are tag-teaming Israel in the guise of being
poltical groups. Why this works, I don't know. To me, they
are intenational criminal organizations and should be targeted wherever
they appear. It's obviously dirty pool to attack people with acts
of war and then hide behind civilians and call your victims terrorists
when they defend themselves. But does the U.N. get it? Not
so's you'd notice. Is everybody nuts?
The left is crying that Israel is hitting civilians, but they seem to
think that Israelis don't have any of those or they'd have condemned
these terrorist groups long ago.
Is it just their reflexive support for whoever looks like an
underdog? You could take 100 Israelis at random and 100
Palestinians, and put them in an arena without weapons, and the
Israelis would be building a community, schools and businesses before
the Arabs had figured out where they were. Then they'd spot the
Jews and declare war, and when they got their noses bloodied they run
to the audience and cry bullies!
These people are the natural result of self-pity and the pity industry
upon which most NGOs and international terrorism is based. Until they
see what's going on and shake off their programming, we can't help
them.
Update: After listening a second time to Christopher Hitchens' comments
on Hugh's program, I feel confirmed in my assessment above.
Hitchens views Israel as an occupation not a state and faults it
for ruling over people who did not consent to its doing so. The
problem is that they have tried to give them a government of their own,
and they have run back to the arms of their captors. The will of
the Palestinian people is a mythi. It's not a safe society in
which to have a will of one's own. If you do, you might give it
voice, and then you'd be one of those corpses strung up by the roving
mobs of "militia."
All I can do from my perch is ask myself, if I were a Palestinian back
in the 1940s, what would I have seen as best for my family. I
wouldn't welcome the return of the Jews, especially if it would cost me
my land, but one thing I think I would have learned living in
that area is that when the elephants dance, the mice should lay
low. If I could see that Israel was coming, whether I or my
people liked it or not. I might have gone to arms, but
sooner or later, I think I would have realized that I didn't want to
make warfare my life's work, especially when I could see farms and
homes and cities being built where my own folk had done nothing for the
past 1,000 years or so. I would, I hope, have realized that my
children in Israel could get educations, jobs and have law and order,
while in my own people I would be another ward of the charity of the
U.N. et al.