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.