David

Karki

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January 7, 2009

Israel’s Battle, and the Morally Bankrupt West

In the past few days, Israel has moved back into the Gaza strip with ground forces, in order to put a stop to Hamas rocket attacks across the border. This is almost a carbon-copy repeat of what happened in southern Lebanon after Israel pulled out of there, only to be greeted with rocket attacks from Hezbollah into Israel proper.

But in that case, Israel did not crush and finish off Hezbollah, thus incurring the morally blind and hypocritical wrath of much of the West while having accomplished nothing substantial in exchange for it. (And arguably making matters worse, if Hezbollah recruitment was aided any in the process.) One hopes that Israel, having learned its lesson then, will not repeat that mistake now and instead remove all capability Hamas has to attack further. In so doing, they will have dealt an enemy a mortal blow, made their own citizenry materially safer and sent a clear message to all who would pick up where Hamas leaves off.

And as for that morally blind West – the United Nations, the mainstream media, some governments – here are some thoughts for them to ponder:

•  The Palestinians bring whatever ill-treatment they may experience entirely upon themselves. If you perpetually behave in a way that puts others in danger, you shouldn't be surprised when they respond to protect themselves. Perhaps if you didn't spend every waking moment trying to “exterminate the Zionist entity”, strapping bombs to yourselves to attack innocent civilians and launching rockets into your neighbors' homes, your movements wouldn't be so restricted. This is happening because you've given the Israelis no choice if they want to live.

They don't want to have to do this. They've tried to give you what you claim to want, pulling out of both southern Lebanon and Gaza, and their thanks for it was nothing but countless explosion craters where your rockets have hit. The next logical step, therefore, is to prevent them from being launched at all.

•  Were this the United States, and militants in Tijuana were lobbing rockets into San Diego and Los Angeles, do you think we'd put up with this for one second? We'd give Mexico one chance to crush the perpetrators, and if they either refused or were unable to do it, we'd march in there and annihilate them ourselves. Yet when Israel does precisely the same thing for the protection of its citizens, they receive nothing but scorn. The only explanation for such an intellectually bankrupt double-standard has to be latent anti-Semitism.

•  The naïve Western idea that if only Palestinians had education, democracy and so forth that they wouldn't be terrorists is stupid in the extreme. They had democracy, and voted in Hamas. They have Gaza University, in which 1,000 Qassam rockets and seven Iranian military trainers were found and seized by the opposition Fatah Party in 2007. Palestinians have been treated at Israeli hospitals, only to turn around and try to blow up the doctors and nurses who showed them compassion.

What makes them behave so monstrously? Does it really matter? You don't try to reason with a rabid pit bull foaming at the mouth that's trying to chomp your legs off. You put it down. I don't at all enjoy using such a vivid metaphor to describe fellow human beings, but then they're not exactly behaving like humans. They're not even behaving like animals, which kill for food or for protection of offspring. As such, as regrettable as it is to have to even consider much less, I can't feel that badly over the prospect of the demise of a subset of humans who have nothing positive to offer humanity.

•  And as far as comparing the self-incurred treatment the Palestinians are receiving to the Israelis, until such time as six or seven million Muslims are herded into gas chambers and then burned in furnaces, they have no right to talk much less take the moral high ground. And so long as Iranian lunatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad keeps running his big mouth and potentially wielding a nuclear bomb, Israel will have no alternative but to presume that the same existential threat continues indefinitely and behave accordingly.

When you think about it, Israel is merely implementing the Bush Doctrine – anyone who aids or harbors a terrorist is one, and will share in their fate. Even the Bush Administration itself hasn't fully lived up to the standard set by those words. Far from being controversial or earning scorn, the moral clarity in this simple act of self-defense should be earning plaudits. That it isn't says something about the world in which we live, and how civilization itself hangs in the balance.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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