Category Archives: Israel

Lebanon & The Partisan Punditocracy

Islam, Israel, Lebanon, Terrorism, War

Once again, American pundits have fallen into camps on the matter of Israel’s leveling of Lebanon. With few exceptions (mostly in the silenced libertarian camp), the issues remain unexamined; everyone is a hack, rooting for a party to the conflict, and ignoring the principles being sacrificed in the process.

The “argument” I most detest—a holdover from that theater of triumphs, Iraq—is the false dichotomy set-up: “What would you have done in Israel’s position?” the custodians of intellectual debate ask plaintively (and deceptively).

How about not destroy an entire (rather modern and open) society, for starters?

Facetiousness aside, whereas in the US it has taken a couple of years for media malpractitioners to catch up with libertarian prescients vis-Ã -vis Iraq, Israelis are already saying exactly what I said in “Call Off the Israeli Air Force!“: precise, limited and delimited, ongoing strikes.

Writes Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz, “Israel was right to launch Operation Change of Direction. The big mistake was in not limiting it to a reprisal raid with a time frame and specific dimensions.” A far cry from the crazed recommendations the “sofa samurais” in the US have been issuing.

As I’ve said, develop a different kind of warfare. Big, bloated armies of conscripts are no match for lean mean voluntary militia. Also fascinating about the robustness of debate in Israel is this: I wishfully wrote that the Israeli Air Force ought to have refused when it “was told to carry out air raids on Lebanese roads and residential real estate.” And sure enough, some magnificent men have shown such independent-minded judgment. Read about it in this Observer article, “Israeli Pilots Deliberately Miss Targets.”

Commentators often evince an astute ideological understanding of the conflict—one I may even share. But the notion, for instance, that Hezbollah is a Jihadist organization that would like to see Israel destroyed does nothing to address whether there is utility or justification in destroying Lebanon. (And by that I imply the need to use western precepts such as Just-War ethics and reason. We are fighting for the West, aren’t we? Or is that just a hollow slogan!?)

From believing Hezbollah is spearheading jihad, it does not follow that one ought to pummel Lebanon and kill many more innocents than guilty. Hezbollah, moreover, represents a small segment of the Lebanese population and government, contrary to the Palestinian Authority, where the jihad agenda is widely shared on the street and by the state apparatus.

The gains from the Israeli assault have been minute and probably temporary, as is evident from the steady stream of Hezbollah-powered rockets (140 just today) launched into Northern Israel. To claim Israel is effectively dealing with the guilty in Lebanon is pie-in-the-sky.

Again, it’s interesting that quite a few military men in Israel as opposed the armchair ideologues abroad, agree with the above propositions. In Israel’s defense, and in deference to that country’s people, the debate over this war there is already in full swing.

Here in the US, it’s still safer to shut up about the “miracle” in Mesopotamia and the Leader who led us there, Peace Be Upon Him.

In Politics, Rubbish Rises to the Top

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Politics

When Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, piously pontificates that the actions of the Israeli government are for the benefit of the Lebanese people (of which, in his atomistic mind, Hezbollah is not a part), and aimed at “freeing them of the cancer of Hezbollah,” I feel bilious.

It’s the same sickness rising one gets when Genghis Bush promotes his actions in Iraq as of benefit to the Iraqi people, a million of whom are now impoverished, displaced, aid-dependent refugees in their own country.

If these pols are such populists and democrats, why did they not let the beneficiaries of their humanitarian humbugs vote to accept or reject their ‘good deeds’? Why not ask the people you are supposedly helping if they want your liberating bombs? Or is this ‘charity’ compulsory?

I’d disrespect Gillerman less if he cut the treacle, and said, “We hate what we’ve become, but we have no option but to kill more innocents than guilty?

Israel in Lebanon is coming across in a worse light than is America in Iraq, even though the reverse is true. The first incursion, as bad as it is, was a response to provocation; the last, nothing of the sort. Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11 and Saddam and Osama never sat in a tree kissing.

But so stupid are the Israelis that they keep commandeering the American rhetoric with respect to Iraq to justify their actions. I guess their thinking goes something along the lines of, “Iraq: hmm, that went well, so let’s take that ‘experience’ and its language and put it to work for us Lebanon.”

Israel Needs Precision Pac Men

Israel

My column, Call “Israel Needs Precision Pac Men” (Or “Call Off the Israeli Air Force!”), calls for calling off the Israeli Air Force, “ they’ve done a horrific job:

“But first, let us agree that a lumbering army of reluctant conscripts (IDF) is no match for a lean mean force of volunteers (Hezbollah). In addition, a conventional military force hasn’t the capability to contain an outfit like Hezbollah …
The Golani Brigade, an outstanding elite unit, is now on the ground. But Israel has better. In future, she should consider stationing on the borders the best of her special-operations units such as the ‘Sayeret.’ It’s trained in surgical strikes, including modern urban counterterrorism operations …
Since special ops soldiers are highly select, motivated volunteers, their esprit de corps will match Hezbollah’s. Since they’re trained in precision, “ deep-penetration operations, they won’t be turning countries into parking lots and their inhabitants into homeless people, or piles of ash.

Comments are welcome, but what I said in this post about some missives not being fit for this classical liberal forum obtains. Letters reveling in the joys of killing non-combatants don’t belong here. Sorry.

Israeli Kids are Just Like Palestinian Kids—NOT

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism

Moral relativists desire nothing more than to equate with impunity the rather civilized and way-too-liberal Israeli society with the savage society adjacent to it. Well, to be fair to these equivocators, moral relativism is the least of their problems; outright immorality is. Their general impetus is to delegitimize Israel in any way possible (of course, as I’ve pointed out, Israel may be helping in the effort.) And if this involves ditching the powers of analogy, so be it.

Enemies of Everything Israel sprung into action, concluding that this image is no different to these:

The first is a photo of Israeli little girls from Kiryat Shmona, on the border with Lebanon and subject to many terrorist assaults over the years. The worst was a massacre in which nine children were slaughtered (a family friend—a pathologist—performed the autopsies).

The girls emerged from the shelters after five days of shelling to find their small town crawling with the military and the press, foreign and local. According to Lisa Goldman, one of the parents addressed a tank shell with the words, “To Nasrallah with love.” The kids decorated it with Israeli flags.

Is there anything wrong with this picture? Not to my mind. Nasrallah is a very bad man indeed. I’d gladly add my signature.

The other photos are a slideshow starring future little suicide bombers, dressed in fatigues, carrying arms, or strapped with Toys “R” Us suicide belts, screaming “Itbuch El Yahud”—death to the Jews. This is clearly a communal educational effort, as the tykes are surrounded by immediate and extended family, grandmothers too.

These delightful folks and their progeny are not inveighing against Sharon, Olmert, or the IDF, but against—the Jews. They are dressed to kill.

Contrast that with the little girls in their dainty frocks. They addressed the shell to a man who wants to do them harm, not to the Lebanese people or to all Arabs. Theirs was an act of patriotism. Is it so evil, in this liberal, emasculated, deracinated world to identify with your defenders and hope they win? Apparently so.

And consider this: how likely is it that those girls, now being indirectly maligned, will grow up to be suicide bombers? Yes, you get my drift.

The girls, moreover, do not have the deductive powers to reason that the shell may harm innocents. This is more than can be said for the idiots who equate them with Tots for Terrorism.

The same creeps also disguise their disingenuous unwillingness to draw objective distinctions with simpering, broad-brush generalities: “woe betides me, for all these kids—Jews and Arabs—are victims…”

Repulsive indeed.