What remains for us to do? The best thing for Israel is to achieve a total ceasefire in exchange for alleviating the blockade of Gaza.
Surely you jest, Mr. Oz. This brings to mind the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”.Israel may decide to stop the blockade of Gaza, but to couch doing so in terms of an “exchange” for anything is stupefyingly insane. Hamas honors nothing but death, it breaches every promise it makes. Even its allies don’t trust it.
This set piece reminds me of nothing so much as the cycle of family violence I used to watch play out during my years as a crisis counselor for battered women. Israel’s leaders act like traumatized family victims, willing to believe the most transparent lies in order to bring back the status quo ante.
Meanwhile the children in such families (or Israel’s citizens, in this case), traumatized too, feel impotent to do anything in the face of their deluded leadership. Some side with those in office, hoping against reality that things will be “different” this time. The others, sadder but wiser, make their own private plans for trying to maintain a safe space for themselves. But there is never a place safe enough when you have an enemy which is essentially depraved and insane.
Mr. Oz is right that Israel must protect its citizens. But “the best thing” he proposes is actually no protection at all. Israelis know this, Hamas knows this, and the immoral international press that ratchets up these events knows it best of all.
Oh the press! It loves this murderous music; the tunes give it a raison d’être. Hamas may be the composer of these obscenities but the press acts as both the conductor for the falsetto screech coming out of Gaza and the drama critic of the production.
- - - - - - - - -
A pox on both of them.
You know what happens when Israel backs down, don’t you? Hezbollah will start in from the Lebanon side. This current kabuki set-piece is just Act I. Meanwhile, the busy terrorists in Lebanon are moving the backdrops and stage pieces in for Act II.
Welcome to 2009, Mr. Obama. We wish you all the good fortune you are going to need to deal with this decades-old mess. Don’t kid yourself, sir: unless crazy-like-a-fox Iran decides to irradiate the show, it will still be going on when your children are great-grandmothers.
8 comments:
This dance has been going on for far too long.
By my reckoning since 1966.
How many times do we need to hear the squealing of the Arabs when they receive exactly the response from Israel that they were hoping to provoke?
How many times the western media goes out of their way to paint the Israelis as the perpetrators of evil?
Let the Arabs suffer the consequences of their own actions.
"What remains for us to do? The best thing for Israel is to achieve a total ceasefire in exchange for alleviating the blockade of Gaza".
Is not that what Israel did when they withdrew from Gaza? And where did it get them? I'll tell you where. Thousands of rockets and mortars launched at them, thats where.
Wars are not won by cease-fires or peace agreements. Israel must (but probably won't) continue bombing until Hamas SURRENDERS UNCONDITIONALLY.
That's the only way wars end permanently.
We are all becoming weary and wary of this perpetual Ground Hog Day. There are two possible game changers, however. 1) This time it is noticeable that the Arab press and some Arab governments aren't buying the melodrama anymore, and they are actually pressing HAMAS to negotiate a lasting peace or lose all support. 2) U.S. anti-terrorist technology permits the targeting and elimination of individual terrorists. By sharing this technology, responsible governments will be able to "take out" the bad guys without the media outcry. Furthermore it will make life for the terrorists so precarious they need to wear Depends 24/7.
Meier Kahane was right.
An Islamic jihadist assassinated him for telling the truth about
Muslim 'truces' and their ultimate loyalty.
Hamas must be eliminated.
U.S. anti-terrorist technology permits the targeting and elimination of individual terrorists. By sharing this technology, responsible governments will be able to "take out" the bad guys without the media outcry.
That will not quell the media outcry. The reason being that the leftist media are not really objecting to the death of civillians but rather the very idea that Israel and the West have a fundamental right to self-defence. According to leftists we have no such right.
The entire West is desperately ill with this kind of thinking. What would it take to cure the condition?
blogagog: Wars are not won by cease-fires or peace agreements. Israel must (but probably won't) continue bombing until Hamas SURRENDERS UNCONDITIONALLY.
That's the only way wars end permanently.
Unfortunately, even unconditional surrender is utterly meaningless when dealing with those whose only form of treaty is hudna. Taqiyya absolutely precludes any meaningful truce. Arafat's signing of the Oslo Accords and his subsequent unabated continuation of jihad against Israel is the model of what we can expect from Islam.
Israel's program of simply exterminating Islamist leadership is the only guaranteed method of ending terrorism. It needs to be applied on a global scale.
Change will come only when a jihadist must first look over his shoulder before shouting "Death to America!".
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