Despite numerous residential meanderings about the country in my lifetime to date(I am now settled down, house and all, in Charlotte, NC), my “point of origin”, as it were, was New York, where I’ve spent several years of my adult life as well.

In my opinion, the two best mayors New York has had since I was old enough to notice were Rudi Giuliani and, though he is a Democrat, Edward Koch — one positive attribute of most N.Y. mayors is that they tend to lead from the front, and put the five boroughs ahead of most political considerations. I say most, not all because, after all, they are politicians.

Koch was a great mayor, very decisive, very colorful and entirely a New Yorker who placed his city first.

Since the Global War On Terror was launched by President Bush, Ed Koch has supported it as he supports, unlike so many of my fellow Jews (the liberal ones) Israel’s right to exist — while Jewish liberals both here in the U.S. and over in Israel are supporting capitulation to Palestinian terrorism, Mr. Koch advocates fighting back. He even wrote a column why, his being a Democrat notwithstanding, he was voting for George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

Basically, the former N.Y. mayor is what most Democrats used to be when I was growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, before that political party was taken over by liberals: Patriotic, supportive of our national defense and a believer that the United States, because we are a rich and powerful world leader that can, has a mission to help spread freedom where we are able throughout the world.

Unlike so many of today’s Democrats, he understands the danger our nation and other western nations face from the third major Jihad by a religion whose entire history, dating back 1300 years, encompasses bloody attempts to achieve Islamic world domination. While liberals do everything in their power to cause us to lose the War On Terror, Mr. Koch is quick to defend our efforts.

In a new Op-Ed column, Mr. Koch points out the western liberal habit of blaming the west (or Israel) the minute there are any charges of collateral damage being “inflicted” by our side, yet glossing over incidents in which terrorists kill innocent civilians by design.

In his Op-Ed, Foolish Western self-flagellation, the former mayor refers to a New York Times Op-Ed (this is not the kind of thing we normally get from the NYT, the columnist in question is the man who took the opening left by the venerable William Safire when the longtime columnist decided to retire his own column) by David Brooks.

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes with the clarity of Bill Safire, whom he has succeeded as The Times in-house moderate. In a June 8 column, Brooks vividly described the cruelty of the Iraqi insurgents:

“The insurgents’ first advantage is that not only are they cruel, they are absolutely cruel. The defining feature of their violence is not merely that they murder, but that they torture those they are about to kill. Shiite militias use drills to bore holds into their victims’ heads. Sunni insurgents saw off fingers and toes. Jihadists partially behead their victims then stomp on their torsos to create gushes of blood before finishing the job. Videos of such acts are posted on the Internet or sold in the markets of towns like Haditha.”

In sharp contrast, Western countries constantly flagellate themselves when civilians are injured or killed in the course of defensive military action against al-Qaeda or its agents.

The above is completely true, though I must add here that it has been pretty well demonstrated by liberals, that aside from their animosity toward Israel and their apparent support of terrorism, much of their “shock and chagrin” stems more from their hatred of Bush and by extension his efforts to protect these same stupid “intellectuals” from either being exterminated by terrorism or losing all the rights they now cherish, especially freedom of speech, to the global caliphate our Islamofascist enemies want to impose upon us.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, senior member of Al-Queda, was killed by U.S. forces directing bombs at a safe-house in which he was believed to be living. A number of men in the house at the time, thought to be his accomplices, were also killed. In addition, a woman and a child inside the house died. Normally when women or children are killed in a combat incident, denunciations of the American military are made. Few denunciations were made in this case, because of the prominence of the terrorist Zarqawi who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians and American and coalition civilian and military personnel.

But, what if Zarqawi had survived and escaped and the others in the house had not? The U.S. would have been denounced around the world by those opposed to our presence in Iraq today, even though the legitimately-elected Iraqi government recently advised the United Nations that it wanted us to remain.

As regards Israel and the Palestinians,

Another example of foolish western self-flagellation is seen in the different responses to actions by Hamas and Israel. Palestinian terrorists, with knowledge and approval of Hamas, launch Qassam rockets at Israel from open fields, and the Israelis respond with artillery shells. The Palestinians’ missiles are usually inaccurate, although they occasionally hit their targets — the towns and cities of Israel and their civilian populations. The Israeli artillery directed at the open fields generally hit the fields and occasionally kill those who launched the missiles.

This weekend, The Times reports: “Hamas’s military wing, which declared a tattered 16-month truce with Israel to be over after the deaths of eight civilians on a Gazan beach - apparently killed by an errant Israeli artillery shell - continued Sunday to fire volleys of Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel. One rocket landed near a school in Sederot, Israel, and badly wounded a 60-year-old resident, Yonatan Engel, a friend of Defense Minister Amir Peretz. Another rocket made a direct hit on a house in Sederot, but there were no injuries.”

Israel is denounced by nations around the world when Palestinian civilians are injured or killed, but rarely are the casualties suffered by Israeli civilians noticed, let alone denounced. There is a major difference between the nature of the two sides’ actions. Israel is responding to missiles directed at its civilian population. It is a basic duty of any government to protect its population from foreign attack. No responsible person suggests that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deliberately targeted innocent Palestinians on a Gaza beach who were injured by what The New York Times called “apparently…an errant Israeli artillery shell.” It is the nature of artillery shells sometimes to go astray.

To truncate here,

We learned Monday that the IDF has ascertained and confirmed, “that the explosion that killed eight Palestinians on Friday, was caused by a stockpile of Hamas explosives.” Will that make any difference to the weepers of the western world?

I doubt it.

So do I.

Look at the Haditha affair — the incident is still under investigation, no actual facts of the matter yet released to the media, yet the liberals, including politicians like that treasonous, politically opportunistic slimeball John Murtha, have already loudly convicted the Marines involved because they believe it will have adverse effects on Bush’s popularity. Yeah, I know, they all “support the troops”.

The liberal way is to keep on shouting their unsupported diatribes so that by the time the truth comes out, even if it’s just the opposite, the lie has become “general knowledge” and they’ll stick by it unto death.

The international terrorist organizations count on the infidels of the west to lose their collective nerve and be unwilling to sustain casualties in this ongoing war of survival between civilizations which might continue for decades. They hope the west will submit to defeat in Iraq and consent to the elimination of Israel, even if that would mean a world dominated by the Islamic fanatics.

Their weapon is fear and their willingness to die as martyrs for their cause while we in the west value every human life. Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s deputy in Iraq, left us these words as his epitaph: “Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute.”

{emphasis mine}

The Op-Ed is entirely on-point, definitely give it a read in its entirety.