Blogs For Victory

Victor Davis Hanson hits the nail right on the head, again:

There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live.

Almost no other issue in recent memory has illustrated the moral bankruptcy of much of the international community. Hamas has no pretensions, like the PA, of being a governing authority; it used violence to rout the PA and then bragged that its charter pledging the destruction of Israel remained unchanged. Israel evacuated Gaza; Gazans in response looted their own infrastructure, alienated both the PA and Egypt,and then sent off more than 6,000 rockets against Israeli civilians, while eagerly becoming a terrorist puppet of theocratic Iran.

Nothing could be more clear: either the fact that a constitutional republic was trying to avoid civilian casualties while a terrorist organization was intent on killing Jewish civilians as it used its own citizens as shields to protect mostly young male terrorists; or the world’s craven reaction to all this.

Again all very creepy — the stuff of Tolkien’s Mordor. It is now clear that the so-called and much praised “international community,” the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

People who have read my stuff for a while know that I frequently refer to the modern era as the Age of Lies – we have just so much untruth passed off as truth that it gets overwhelming at times. There are those who are neither Israeli nor Arab (and thus have no dog in the hunt) who have been convinced that Israel is the evil aggressor in all of this. Only a society awash in lies can believe such a thing – and keep in mind, this has nothing to do with the worth of Israel’s current military operation. You can justifiably state that Israel should not be attacking right now – that is a rational position one can hold…but to hold that Israel is other than the aggrieved party and that Hamas is wicked is to be either a liar, or a complete fool.

As a for-instance in our pervasive the lies are: We’ve heard it reported that hundreds of Palestinians are dead. What is the source? The Hamas terrorists. Oh, you can probably find some report from some ostensibly non-partisan group saying this or that about casualties…but the battle is on going and no one in Gaza has the time to actually go around verifying the number of dead, and whether or not any particular dead person is civil or military. In other words, other than the certainty that people have been killed in the fighting, we have no other information which can be classed as news about the number of dead in Gaza. And yet, day after day, there goes the MSM toting up the body count as if they’ve actually got a verified number and each time an Israeli bomb lands there’s someone trotting over to the crater and counting the dead. Of course, they don’t – they’re calling their contacts at Hamas and the Hamas people are just making up numbers which sound horrific, knowing that whatever number they give out will be faithfully transmitted by the MSM. And this leave aside the entire issue of whether or not we should even ask Hamas for their views – we didn’t pause to get Goebbles’ view, did we?

To be fair about this, my side of the aisle has its share of lies on this matter, too. I do wish that those who advocate an aggressive stance against terrorism (a position I adhere to) would leave off the name-calling and callousness towards our enemies. For full disclosure, I used to do that, too – but with age comes (hopefully) some wisdom and I think I better understand the necessity of remembering that its our brothers and sisters on the receiving end of those Israeli planes and artillery pieces. Some of them are actually wicked and bent on evil, but most are just poor people bamboozled into supporting wicked acts, or people just caught in the cross fire and trying to keep their heads down until its all over. The truth is that they are people and have a claim on us – yes, even the person right now arming a rocket to be fired at Israeli citizens has a claim on us. A lesser claim, to be sure, than the Israeli citizens, but a claim none the less.

The truth is that war is a nasty business – but, also, that it isn’t the worst thing which can happen. The truth is that Israel, warts and all, is on a much higher moral plane than the people in Hamas. The truth is that Hamas started this battle. The truth is that a democracy must be permitted to defend itself against non-democratic enemies. The truth is that the enemy targets civilians. The truth is that Israel does not target civilians. The truth is that all decent and right thinking people want peace. The truth is that those who run Hamas are neither decent nor right thinking. Keep truth in mind as we go through this terrible time – and once the fighting is over, remember that the truth requires us to, as Lincoln said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”