August 03, 2006
Barbarians at the gates
The Romans had the Goths. The Persians had the Mongols (actually, just about everyone wound up with the Mongols at some point). We, representing 21st century civilization, have the Organization of the Islamic Conference: the president of Iran is rallying the troops to accomplish his ultimate goal, the destruction of Israel. Anyone who thinks they'll stop there is naive at best.
Not able to attain this immediately, he is using bleeding-heart sentiments in both the UN and the West at large to enforce an immediate cease-fire so that they don't continue to kick the motherloving carcasses of his minions in Lebanon and Syria.
We must resist all calls from Islamic regimes for, well, pretty much everything. There should be an end to hostilities as soon as, and no sooner than, Hezbollah is destroyed as an operational force.
An appropriate and interesting view.
The Theater of Jihad
By Michelle Malkin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
Welcome to the marquee performance of "Qana: The Fraud and the Furious," brought to you by the Acting Guild of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage.
The drama unfolded over the weekend with mob scenes across the Muslim world, ostensibly— ostensibly— in response to civilian deaths in Qana, Lebanon. Angry Muslims from Beirut to Gaza to Lahore set fire to American and Israeli flags. They burned effigies of Western leaders. They raised their voices in chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
The nervous nellies sitting in the world's balcony seats exclaimed that the tragedy in Qana will make the Muslims hate us more. But if the uproar over the accident in Qana-an Israeli exception to the Hezbollah rule— sounds like a tired old re-run to you, well, it is.
This ongoing production utilizes the same talented field of Jew-haters and West-haters and flag-burners and machete-wielders who brought you worldwide months of manufactured rage over the Mohammed Cartoons, crazed riots in Nigeria over the Miss World pageant, sharia-approved murders in Somalia of World Cup soccer fans, the fictional Jenin "massacre," the fable of Mohammed al-Dura, and ululating protests over the corrupting influences of the "Satanic Verses," Theo Van Gogh, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's, the sacrilegious Burger King ice cream swirl, Valentine's Day, and Piglet from "Winnie the Pooh."
The truth about Muslim outrage over Qana is that it's not really about the tragic deaths at Qana— just like the Mohammed cartoon jihad was not really about the cartoons. It's a pretext for much grander goals to defeat the infidels— be they Israeli, Danish, Dutch, or American.
Remember: Muslim riots over the Mohammed cartoons printed by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper last fall were stoke and manufactured amid attempts to bully Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency's decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. Iran blamed Israel for the cartoons in a speech marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
Now, the Qana jihad, gleefully stoked by Iran, is unfolding amid mounting U.N. Security Council pressure on Tehran to suspend its nuclear program. What better way to distract from Hezbollah's atrocities and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's annihilatie-the-Jews plans than to start screaming about Israel's "war crimes" and Western crimes against humanity.
As we watch Hezbollah's horrible parade of dead children in Qana replay endlessly on television, here is a suggestion for all the intrepid American journalists gallivanting with Hezbollah's handlers in the region: Perhaps you could put down the figurative hookah pipes, take off your sympathy hajibs, and find out the identity of the green-helmeted guy holding up baby corpses in Qana up as props for your sensational, page-one pictures.
Is he just an ordinary bystander? A rescuer who just happened to be in the same place 10 years ago traipsing around with dead children's bodies to exploit an accidental Israeli bombing prompted by terrorists hiding behind civilians?
A civilian volunteer or a propaganda producer?
To his credit, MSNBC reporter Richard Engel picked up on a question the blogosphere has been asking since the toddler corpse-paraders in Qana took center stage: Where were all the men? His reporting underscores Hezbollah's evil m.o.-embedding themselves in civilian populations to force exactly the kind of tragic error from Israel that appears to have occurred at Qana. "[W]*e went house to house in trying to figure out where all the young men were. It seems that some of them were fighters, some of them were Hezbollah members that were out — this according to Hezbollah people who didn't want to be interviewed but we convinced them to talk to us."
To the photographer-stenographers who were herded to the scene 8 hours after the strike, why is it that the bodies of the children were already in a state of rigor mortis? How to explain the sparkling clean pacifier clipped onto a dust-covered toddler carried around by the friendly corpse-parader? And why were the women and children kept in the building for so long? Questions abound. Answers are as scarce as men in that Qana building.
"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare wrote. The journalists of our age have chosen their costumes: court jesters in the Theater of Jihad.
There will be no victory until Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Quada, et al. are totally and utterly destroyed.
Posted by: Nathan at August 3, 2006 01:18 PMPerhaps I could understand your resentment if the modern state of Israel was actually a natural state.
At the end of WWII, the United States, along with Great Britian, decided to create and place the Israeli state in the middle of a hostile Arab world, a decision that Arabs have resented ever since. The fact that the USA has remained the primary guardian and care-giver to Israel ever since has not made the situation any better.
Perhaps a great deal of the present-day anti-American attitudes and violence that characterize the Middle East today could have been avoided had we simply stayed out of the Middle East to begin with.
Posted by: Ben at August 4, 2006 09:02 AMI have no illusions as to the nature and history of Israel. It's certainly not indigenous to the area. But regardless of the history, three things are true: 1) It's the only Western, liberal-democratic state in the region, and thus inherently deserving of our unflinching support, 2) It's a staunch US ally against Islamic extremism, and 3) The Islamsists would want us dead even without Israel. The particular anti-American exhibitions might be diminished, but the hatred of freedom, secularism, and pluralism would be as strong as ever. Exhibit A: Kashmir.
And for those interested in UN oversight and "multilateralism", please note that the modern state of Israel was created by a UN mandate in 1948, a mandate which the Arab world immediately defied. Perhaps this is one more reason why the UN should be relegated to a strictly humanitarian organization. But the UN is not the solution to the problem of Israel because it is the proximate cause of the state of Israel.
Posted by: ryan at August 4, 2006 11:50 AMI have no problem with Israel capturing, prosecuting, and punishing Islamic extremists who kill and terrorize civilians. But I don't see much of that going on, if at all. I see Hezbollah specifically targeting Israeli citizens, and I see Israel retaliating by killing innocent civilians in Lebanon.
Israel and the USA seem to be stuck in the old style of warfare, in which both sides approach each other on a battle field and then fight each other. Terrorists (i.e. criminals) do not fight in this style; they operate in urban settings. Sending large masses of troops to an urban setting is not going to accomplish much more than to kill innocent civilians. Sending small, specially trained task forces into these urban settings to apprehend and, if necessary, kill these terrorists would be a far better solution.
I often think about how when a man in the USA murders an innocent person and then flees to a building in an urban setting, the police respond by surrounding the house, attempting to apprehend him, and shooting him if he resists. Certainly, this response is appropriate. Now imagine the outcry if instead of sending the police, we simply dropped a bomb on his house, killing the murderer along with all of the innocent neighbors who happen to be living in the same neighborhood. Who in their right mind would suggest that such a situation was just? Yet that seems to be the mindset of the Israeli and American government leaders, that any amount of force, no matter how excessive, and no matter how many civilians are killed, is appropriate, just so long as we kill the criminals at the same time.
Posted by: Ben at August 9, 2006 10:41 AM