War is not a good thing, but it is sometimes an unfortunate necessity. That said, in forcing that necessity upon Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas have, to all intents and purposes, all but pleaded with the Israelis for the exciting experience they are having now.

BEIRUT — Israel intensified its air assault on Lebanon yesterday, bombing central Beirut for the first time and pounding seaports and a key bridge as it tightened a noose around this reeling nation.

Trying to defuse the crisis, Lebanon’s prime minister indicated he might send his army to take control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah — a move that might risk civil war.

Mighty nice of you, friend. You and your citizens have no problem whatsoever with a major terrorist organization being part and parcel of your country until they bring the wrath of the most powerful war machine in the Middle East down on your country. Suddenly, you are going to “take control”, even at the risk of civil war. Now that the country you govern is being physically dismantled right before your eyes and well beyond your control, you want to get up on your hind legs and do what you should have done some time ago, except for your support of the terrorists and the support for the terrorists by most of your citizens.

Like the Israeli government has said on the subject, “Seeing is believing”.

On Israel’s second front, against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, Israeli aircraft yesterday struck the Economy Ministry of the Hamas-led Palestinian government and three other targets, killing two persons, Palestinian and Israeli officials reported.

Israeli tanks approached the town of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza this morning, residents and Palestinian security forces said. The town lies across the border from an Israeli town, Sderot, frequently hit by Hamas guerrilla rockets.

What did these Islamofascist zealots expect? That they could attack Israel forever and with impunity, and not eventually (like now) face the wrath the Jewish State’s awesome military forces are capable of dishing out when it is time to defend the homefront?

In a recent post, I referred to an expression: If you mess around with the bandwagon, you have to expect to get hit with the horn.

Wellllllllllllllll……………….

Washington Times bossman Wesley Pruden, as brutally frank as always, tells us,

If you’re looking for a fight in a dark and dangerous neighborhood, you can usually find one. If you pick on the wrong man, you deserve the bloody nose, cracked teeth or broken jaw.

Hmmmmm, sounds sort of like what some critters in Lebanon and some other critters in the Gaza Strip are learning to identify with, even as we speak.

Read Wesley Pruden’s OpEd Here.

If you’re an American liberal, anybody at the NYT {except William Safire} or an Islamofascist, read it and weep.

So it’s the wee hours, I recently finished doing some work and have done some blogging, it’s almost time I hit the rack and I’m kicking back with a large mug of Cafe Bustelo and some Sambuca on the side. I have some old music(rightnow, the theme from Romeo & Juliet, next I think Paul Mauriat’s Love Is Blue) playing from my MusicMatch library via Logitech speakers I bought last December {Logitech gets my personal uncompensated endorsement, the sound is excellent} and I’m thinking about the state of things…

Israel is fighting a war against Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Gaza. We’re talking war, not just a small counterterror Op, in which the IDF is fighting, for the moment, on 2 fronts.

The best President we’ve had since early 1988 is in the process of diminishing America’s sovereignty several notches in the pursuit of forming a small-scale EU with Mexico and Canada. What’s really disturbing about this is that we hear almost nothing from the media about this and even less from members of Congress.

Now, where the MSM’s concerned, I can understand. Being liberals, they have been busting their touchases these last few years to propagandize we, the people, into casting off “the bonds” of American identity and love of country, and becoming “people of the world united” or something like that, becoming as much like France as possible and of course, offering our collective “guilty American neck” to the chopping block of Islam.

{Ah, Summer Place, by Percy Faith!}

It’s really great to know that fellow Americans like the communists at the ACLU and the traitors folks at the New York Times are behind the nation 100% — Actually, to judge from what they consider journalism, they have become what comes out of the nation’s behind. Get some Charmins, clean ‘em up. On the other hand, if you’re in a priveleged position in a government security or intelligence agency, you can report on the latest defense secrets to the NYT and they guarantee to safeguard your identity while they print the details. Can’t blame ‘em, right? Someone’s got to help fundamentalist Islam murder us, right? It may as well be Keller as anyone, right? Thank G-d he took the initiative to act on our behalf!

{Every Time We Touch, by Maggie Reilly, who had one of the most awesomely beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. She did some recordings with Mike Oldfield as well as her own great stuff back in the 1980s. I’d've loved to see her and Annie Haslam do a back-to-back concert, they’d have been highly compatible, or her and Annie’s band, Renaissance, about tied as my second favorite with Yes, just behind my #1, Focus}

Wow, at half a century, the 1970s and 80s seem like contemporaries of the Boston Tea Party!

At 50, you also have memories of a time when nobody calling himself an American would disrespect our country and the principles upon which it was founded the way the Democratic Party, via its liberal element, does today.

At 50, you can rejoice that you won’t be here to see the end result of what liberalism turns our country into over the next half century.

My prediction is the society Sly Stallone is defrosted into in Demolition Man, where cops, not even armed with lethal weapons, “request” that a criminal lay down his weapon and submit to arrest, and there’s no enforcement procedure to respond to “Fuck you, make me!” because in the Utopian mindset of that time, citizens naturally respond as expected.

I’d hate, however, to be forced to learn how to use the 3 sea shells.

They’re not showing much concern for the protection of your card info in their systems, though they’re more than happy to take your money.

It would seem that in this age of identity theft, all too many retailers are chaffing at the bit to accept payment for their merchandise via your credit cards and debit cards while, at the same time, they’re not quite as tenacious where protecting the confidential information — your confidential information — their card processing terminals collect to obtain transaction approval.

What’s up with that?

Mona Charen is one of my favorite political columnists. I recently read her book, Do Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help(And The Rest Of Us) and was really disappointed…. when I realized I’d hit the last page. It was so on-point and such a great read that I hated it to end. She really knows whereof she speaks, and hasn’t got any problem with saying it point blank, PC be damned.

At any rate, her latest column weighs in on Israel’s justification for the long overdue defensive action they are engaged in, even as I type this post.

Excerpt –

(The Washington)

Post starts with the swearing in of the Hamas government on March 29. Fair enough. But the next item is “June 9: Explosion kills seven members of a Gaza family. Witnesses blame Israeli artillery, but Israel denies it.” Missing is any reference to the non-stop shelling of Israel from the Gaza strip that began in 2005 and has not let up since. Nearly 3,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel…

Read On.

Stepping completely away from politics for the moment, this is an e-card I received from a friend whom I haven’t talked to, emailed or otherwise had contact with for some time, entirely my fault.

H/T Nikki

…. is this excellent editorial at The New Republic.

What has been clarified by this round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, first and foremost, the character of Israel’s adversaries. They are Islamist terrorists, and proud to be so. More ominously, they are Islamist terrorists come to power. Hamas is no longer only a movement; it is now also a government. In the months since Hamas was elected by the Palestinians to govern (or misgovern) them, the regime of Ismail Haniyeh and company has presided over the launching of hundreds of Qassam rockets into Israel, applauded a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv restaurant (it would have been hypocritical of them not to applaud it!), allowed an unprecedented escalation of the conflict with the firing of a souped-up rocket into Ashkelon–the first time such a strike has been made against a major Israeli city–and, of course, kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit. All of this, again, is the work of a government. When Hamas was elected, there was an eruption of assurances in the media that power will breed responsibility, that the drudgeries of governing will usurp the ecstasies of bombing, and so on. “Hamas?” the headline on the cover of The New York Review of Books asked hopefully. But the Hamas rulers of Palestine have made it plain that they see no contradiction between governing and bombing. Success at the ballot box has had no calming effect. It has merely conferred political legitimacy upon moral depravity.

The long and the short of it is that Israel is not defending herself against guerilla activities by a faction of “downtrodden” souls, they are defending themselves against an Act Of War by a sovereign government. If the Palestinians want terrorists as leaders, well, so be it — they can reap what they’ve sown.

And as for Hezbollah and their Lebanese hosts, welllllll, they were warned a long time ago….

Hezbollah, of course, is not a government, but it is a part of a government. Its freedom of action, its unreconstructed radicalism, its pervasive presence in Lebanese politics: All this brings to mind nasty memories of a few decades ago, so that it is not incorrect to say that, over the last 30 years, Lebanon has exchanged a PLO mini-state within its borders for a Hezbollah mini-state within its borders. When Shalit was kidnapped, Hamas cited the precedent of Hezbollah’s kidnappings (and prisoner-exchanges) in the past, as if in exoneration of its own extortion. Hezbollah has always been Hamas’s teacher in the great madrassa of anti-Israeli terrorism. Now the teacher has taken a cue from the student and taken its own Israeli hostages. Israel must now remind its adversaries that it was deadly in earnest when, decades ago, it proclaimed that it would tolerate no such aggression along its northern border.

When you rent a DVD, you are deluged at the start of the feature with federal and international warnings regarding the illegality and criminal penalties of bootlegging the contents of the disc. When you see a no parking sign, there is, as often as not, a warning that if you park there, your car will be towed away and how much it will cost to get it back. A “No Trespassing” sign often makes sure you understand that if you trespass, you will be prosecuted. When I worked in a casino security department and we “86″ed someone from the property, we read them, from a card that everybody carried, a trespass warning that left no doubt that the next time the 86er was found in the casino or anyplace else on our property, he or she would be immediately arrested and sent to jail, and prosecuted. If the subject didn’t understand English or purported not to, or even had the slightest foreign accent, we would call in an employee(a dealer, change person, whoever) that was fluent in the subject’s native language and have them translate the trespass warning word-for-word. On highways, “No Littering” signs tell you how much you will be fined for littering.

The reason for all these warnings and posted explanations of the penalties for the transgressions indicated is to make unmistakeably plain what will happen if the warnings are not heeded, so that in court, the “I didn’t know” defense would not hold any water. Unscrupulous, greasy, seedy, anal-cavity liberal trial lawyers and drooling left wing judges brought this necessity upon society, but that’s one for another time.

My point being, decades ago, Israel warned the Lebanese and their terrorist Hezbollah butt-boys that there would be dire military consequences if there were any further cross border attacks — the Lebanese government is responsible for dealing with its in-house terror factions. If they choose to let them do as they please, they, like the Palestinians who voted in terrorism as their choice of leadership, deserve whatever Israel feels like dishing out. Actions have consequences, and if you indulge in the first, you have to accept the second.

And make no mistake about the culpability of other countries as well, like Iran and Syria. This is war by every “legal” definition no matter what the “international community” says — and it was declared on Israel, not the other way around, by governments that either enjoy legitimate sovereignty or, as in the case of the Palestinians, are recognized as such.

There is also a larger strategic dimension to the Hamas-Hezbollah offensive. These provocations stink of Assad and Ahmadinejad. The Hamas action in Gaza appears to have been ordered by Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader who resides in Damascus–which is to say, it is also a piece of Syrian intrigue. Nor can anything of significance take place in Lebanon without the sanction of Damascus; and Hezbollah enjoys not only the toleration of Syria but also the time-honored support of Iran, which is also Syria’s great ally in a region that may be otherwise turning in a better direction. Perhaps Meshal’s responsibility for the Gaza attack will now allow Haniyeh to masquerade as a moderate. (The Washington Post this week published an op-ed by Haniyeh that was full of outrageous assertions. It seems that an election is all that stands between terrorism and punditry.)

I sincerely hope that liberals in Israel (fat chance, if they’re anything like American liberals) have now taken to heart the consequences of making concessions to the “my way or the highway” brand of terrorism that seems to be the driving force behind Islam.

I love the last paragraph in the editorial:

It is also worth noting that the Hamas-Hezbollah aggression is aimed at damaging precisely those political forces in Israel–now represented by Ehud Olmert’s government–that withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza and is committed to withdrawing Israeli settlers (70,000 of them) from the West Bank. It was one of the great ironies of recent times that Olmert’s party rose in Israel at the exact moment that Hamas rose in Palestine; but the irony has turned deadly. They, the Palestinians, really do want everything. And so they are about to learn, yet again, that, as long as they want everything, they will get nothing. This may satisfy the nihilists in charge, since nihilists live for nothing.

Even though our own federal Immigration enforcement authorities seem to be having a problem with doing the job we pay them to do, it’s great to know that the U.S. Coast Guard is on the ball.

On December 18, 2005 Rivero was seen operating a 33-foot Donzi (go-fast) heading north traveling at 38 knots when he was intercepted by a Coast Guard response boat. The Coast Guard crew energized their blue lights and attempted to communicate with the operator of the speeding go-fast. Rivero failed to stop his boat and on two occasions attempted to ram the Coast Guard boat.

The Coast Guard crew used warning shots to persuade Rivero to stop, but he continued operating the boat in a reckless manner. After failing to comply, the Coast Guard boarding team fire disabling fire into the go-fast’s engines.

Once on board the stopped go-fast, the boarding team found 10 Cuban migrants in a sealed compartment. Rivero and a second smuggler had placed the migrants in a forward compartment shutting the hatch with a bungee cord from the outside.

In February, After picking up migrants in Cuba, he was chased by a Cuban gun boat when a female from his boat fell over board and drowned. Rivero was again intercepted by the Coast Guard with 21 illegal Cuban migrants on board a 30-foot go-fast 50 miles southeast of Key West, Fla.

Having been convicted, Rivero has been sentenced to 10, count ‘em, ten years.

Way to go, Coasties!

This arrived in an email forward and I thought I’d share it.

The phrase “cheap labor” is a myth, a farce, and a lie. There is no such thing as “cheap labor.” Take, for example, an illegal Mexican who sneaks in here with his wife and five children. He takes a job for five or six dollars an hour. At that wage with six dependents he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year gets an “earned income credit” of up to $3,200 free. He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent, food stamps, and free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care. His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school, and require bi-lingual teachers and books that taxpayers provide. He doesn’t have to worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins, and printed material. He cannot be fired, harassed, or sued. He and his family receive the equivalent of $20 to $30 an hour in benefits, while working Americans are lucky to have $5 or $6 an hour left after paying their bills and his, to say nothing of paying for increased crime, graffiti, and trash cleanup.
Cheap labor? My ass!

H/T Brenda

This was bound to happen after Israel ceded Gaza to the Palestinians, especially with Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian Authority. The message they sent was, “Hey, look, Mohammed, terrorism really does work, see? You’re getting Gaza! Now, keep up the good work, and remember — the harder you terrorize, the more concessions we’ll make!”

So it’s come to another war, this one against terrorists {like the war the Bush Administration is prosecuting} rather than a specific government, though the latter, as the possibility is advanced in the second article I will be linking to in this post, is strong as well in the not-too-distant future.

Here is what happens when a country is forced, by way of self defense, to go to war:

The two-storey house was reduced to rubble and rescue teams frantically searched through the wreckage for survivors while a neighbouring house was close to collapse. The force of the blast had shattered nearby windows and flying masonry had blown holes in the walls of other buildings.

Witnesses reported that the body of a child had been pulled from the wreckage of the house.

Israel defended the attack, saying that members of the Hamas military wing had been meeting in the house.
“Israel is compelled to take action against those planning to unleash lethal terror attacks against Israeli citizens,” said David Baker, an official in the office of the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert. “Palestinian terrorist leaders continue to take refuge amongst and hide behind their own civilians.”

But the strike is likely to heighten international condemnation of Israel’s reoccupation of Gaza Strip. Last week the EU and UN criticised Israel for “disproportionate use of force” against Palestinians in the territory, while the Swiss government alluded to the Geneva conventions on the laws of war in stating that the Israeli campaign amounted to “collective punishment”.

The EU and the UN can go to hell — where are their condemnations when Palestinians butcher innocent Israeli men, women and children with their rocket attacks and their suicide bombs? Oh, wait, I forgot — according to the EU, terrorism is acceptable when it doesn’t happen on their turf, but against Israel, and according to the UN, any attrocity committed against Israelis is hunky-dory. It’s fine, no problem. And what did the Swiss think when we bombed Germany during the Second World War? Did they howl then that it was “collective punishment”? I don’t think so.

The Palestinians have no right to complain about anything Israel does to defend herself against their terrorist attacks. If someone comes up to you on the street and attacks you without provocation, it’s your right to decimate them brutally and without mercy, simply because they forced you to fight against your will. Similarly, the Israelis, who have bent over backwards to achieve peace, including fulfilling their various treaty obligations on a totally one-sided basis, reserve the inalienable right to respond as forcefully as they deem necessary to protect themselves against these animals. If the Palestinians who claim to favor peaceful coexistence take umbrage with that, they shouldn’t vote terrorists into power. What they should do, however, is clean their own house, thereby eliminating the need for the IDF to do it for them.

Back in my younger days of reading western shitkicker novels, one of writer Wayne D. Overholster’s characters used an expression that has since stuck in my mind and sums things up rather well:

If you mess around with the bandwagon, you have to expect to get hit with the horn.

If the Palestinians can stand by and allow terrorism to be practiced on their behalf, then they can share in the penalties when payback time comes around.

Now, I was opposed to any surrender of land by Israel to the Palestinians, as were right thinkers and others with common sense everywhere, especially in Israel, as I’ve made more than plain on a number of occasions, but, with a hat tip to Stephanie Pearson for bringing this column to my attention, I tend to agree with Yossi Klein Halevi here regarding several factors pertinent to this post. A free suscription to The New Republic Online may be required to access the entire article.

The next Middle East war–Israel against genocidal Islamism–has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah’s latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel’s antagonists won’t be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites.

To truncate a bit,

For the Israeli right, this is the moment of “We told you so.” The fact that the kidnappings and missile attacks have come from southern Lebanon and Gaza–precisely the areas from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn–is proof, for right-wingers, of the bankruptcy of unilateralism. Yet the right has always misunderstood the meaning of unilateral withdrawal. Those of us who have supported unilateralism didn’t expect a quiet border in return for our withdrawal but simply the creation of a border from which we could more vigorously defend ourselves, with greater domestic consensus and international understanding. The anticipated outcome, then, wasn’t an illusory peace but a more effective way to fight the war. The question wasn’t whether Hamas or Hezbollah would forswear aggression but whether Israel would act with appropriate vigor to their continued aggression.

And of course, the unilateralists had no idea that the Arabs, with whose charactar they certainly must be quite familiar given their daily proximity, and the benefit of past experience, would view the withdrawal as a sign of defeat and press harder. No, of course not. Liberal reasoning is not restricted to the U.S., Canada and western Europe. No matter how many times a snake bites them, liberals will continue to try to reason with it.

So it wasn’t the rocket attacks that were a blow to the unilateralist camp, but rather Israel’s tepid responses to those attacks. If unilateralists made a mistake, it was in believing our political leaders–including Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert–when they promised a policy of zero tolerance against any attacks emanating from Gaza after Israel’s withdrawal. That policy was not implemented–until two weeks ago. Now, belatedly, the Olmert government is trying to regain something of its lost credibility, and that is the real meaning of this initial phase of the war, both in Gaza and in Lebanon.

Still, many in Israel believe that, even now, the government is acting with excessive restraint. One centrist friend of mine, an Olmert voter, said to me, “If we had assassinated [Hamas leader] Haniyeh after the first kidnapping, [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah would have thought twice about ordering another kidnapping.” Israel, then, isn’t paying for the failure of unilateral withdrawal, but for the failure to fulfill its promise to seriously respond to provocations after withdrawal.

Bullshit. They are paying for both.

More weighing in by the “international community”:

Absurdly, despite Israel’s withdrawal to the international borders with Lebanon and Gaza, much of the international community still sees the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as a legitimate act of war: Just as Israel holds Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, so Hamas and Hezbollah now hold Israeli prisoners. One difference, though, is that inmates in Israeli jails receive visits from family and Red Cross representatives, while Israeli prisoners in Gaza and Lebanon disappear into oblivion. Like Israeli pilot Ron Arad, who was captured by Hezbollah 20 years ago, then sold to Iran, and whose fate has never been determined. That is one reason why Israelis are so maddened by the kidnapping of their soldiers.

Note that it doesn’t matter to the “international community” that Israel treats its captured terrorists humanely, just as those who condemn America for the war in Iraq, including our very own liberals, do their best to ignore the beheadings and other mutilations of prisoners by the terrorists we are at war against, and equally ignore the humane treatment of the prisoners at GITMO, who fare much better than inmates of our own prisons. As I’ve written before, Israel’s very existence is an inconvenience to the so-called “international community”, so they could care less what is done to Israel, while they defend the terrorists’ right to terrorize Israel as vigorously as they please.

In exchange for the return of captured Israeli soldiers, the terrorists demand the release of their brethren from Israeli jails, such nice believers in The Religion Of Peace and paragons of justice and virtue as one Samir Kuntar:

Another reason is the nature of the crimes committed by the prisoners whose release is being demanded by Hezbollah and Hamas. One of them is Samir Kuntar, a PLO terrorist who in 1979 broke into an apartment in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, took a father and child hostage, and smashed the child’s head against a rock. In the Palestinian Authority, Kuntar is considered a hero, a role model for Palestinian children.

Why not free that frigging animal? Not only would he be a role model for Palestinian children, he’d also be a hero to every liberal on the planet. Perhaps he and Mr. Mumia could go on a lecture tour together.

Indian officials would seem to attribute this to Pakistani Muslims.

Officials said eight explosions hit the evening rush-hour trains packed with thousands of people. No group claimed responsibility for the attack, the largest the city has experienced in years. Officials and security analysts said the coordinated explosions shared similarities to recent bomb attacks by Kashmiri militants, who in October set off three bomb blasts in markets in the capital city of New Delhi, killing more than 60 people.

Sorry, I just can’t find it anywhere within myself to be surprised. This is how Islam operates.