Shylock Draws Blood!

Like Shylock, Israel has a right to justice. It withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and UNIFIL was charged to disarm Hiz'b'allah and ensure Israel's security. The contract was broken and Israel, unprotected from unprovoked assault, has a right to self-defence. But, like Shylock, who could take a pound of flesh but couldn’t spill a drop of Antonio's blood, Israel may disarm Hiz'b'allah only if it doesn’t kill anyone, according to the EU and prevailing media.

Kfar Kana is a town from which, for many years, many rockets have been launched at Israeli farms, towns and cities. Israel warned the residents of the impending bombing to knock out Hiz'b'allah positions well in advance. Has Hiz'b'allah ever warned residents that a bomb was coming?

News agencies all over the world have gone back to New Testament times and call Kfar Kana "Qana." The rage over this particular killing of innocents has been pretty intense and, with a CTV newsreader on Wednesday night beginning his report: "Qana, where Jesus attended a wedding and turned water into wine. Today it’s blood." One can’t help wondering if there isn’t some unconscious anti-Semitism here that’s stewing the minds of reporters. Or is it just that Hiz'b'allah knows how to offer news junkies (such is the beast) the junk that bleeds and leads? Or are there other motives, conscious or unconscious in the culture of the West?

All three. Clearly the Jew card is been played again, as it was in Nazareth when Palestinian gunmen took over and trashed the Church of the Nativity. Somehow the Israelis got blamed for that while subtil Arafat provided the soundtrack: "See? They’re killing Jesus again!" his eyes bulging like a silent screen star’s.

There can be no doubt as to the expertise of Hiz'b'allah propaganda. Hamas too. Many staged events are distorting the picture and issues of the middle east. The boy killed in the crossfire was staged. The bombing of the beach in Gaza was staged. The photo of the "Palestinian youth on the Temple Mount" was staged. And the news from Beirut is staged.

But the most interesting and possibly most important thing going on here is the Western proclivity for order, for proportion. Israeli response has been, it has been charged, disproportionate. It is this same feeling for proportion that leads so many to believe that there must be a cause for Arab hatred for Jews and so it’s assumed that the hatred is mutual. To the Western mind this is a reasonable expectation and any other possibility is rejected because it is simply too painful to contemplate.

Horror movies are full of all kinds of characters (Freddie, Jason,…) who stalk and murder for no reason whatever. This is the greatest terror, that death stalks us for no reason and, good or bad, we all die in the end. Kafka’s great novel, The Trial, is precisely about this. The reason why it’s so frightening is that it’s so true. Death has no favorites; he takes us all and the reason why horror movies are horrible is because we repress that fact. The horror movie brings all this to the surface.

So does war, and just as the death of a loved one must have a "cause," i.e. cancer, heart attack, too much butter, too much sun, too much fun, so hostilities must have their cause. It is so unimaginable and repugnant to the Western mind that there are people who bring up their children so that they will kill themselves in order to kill the enemy. Good people assume that the same must be true on the other side because if it isn’t, the world is a world full of Freddies and Jasons.

The world is full of Freddies and Jasons and they are checked only by the rule of law. Today we hear renewed calls to remove the Old Testament from the Christian Bible. Decisions taken more than 16 centuries ago are now under debate again. Separating the two books is an odd way to ask the question, "Shall we throw the Jews to the wolves?" How, without the Old Testament, could such a thing be done? What justification for such an act could be found in the NT? It was the OT and, most of all, its concept of law, that allowed a real world Church and real world nations to survive history.

These new musings are ominous for the Jewish people. But there is a silver lining. At least these biblical musings show that, unconsciously at least, the West is not so far from its roots. As secular as it appears, the West still has a foundation and, as terrorists strip away its polite fictions, it, the West, is beginning to feel those foundations pressing against the soles of their shoes.

It would be a mistake, in the Crusade that is starting and stopping today, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The Jew and Muslim have been historically lumped together by the Christian when, in fact, they needn’t be. The Christian stands to the Muslim as brother, to the Jew as son. Kronos and Zeus, El and Baal, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau: History is an endless repetition of the same problems. Do we have the wisdom yet to — not to solve them: I don’t ask for that much — but at least to see our problems clearly through our natures, our natures clearly through our problems?

Who's Responsible?
(for the war)

As of 3:21 PM EDT, The Globe and Mail poll stands as follows:

Hezbollah (36%) 50922 votes
Iran (8%) 12169 votes
Israel (34%) 48580 votes
United Nations (1%) 1764 votes
United States
(10%) 15036 votes
Lebanon (10%) 14805 votes
Total votes: 143276

If we assume the US vote is anti-Israeli and the UN vote pro-Israel, it breaks down roughly to 55% support Israel, 45% the enemy. Considering the expertise of Hiz'b'allah's propaganda, that's not too bad.

"...apparently deliberate" attack

Kofi Annan accuses Israel of an "apparently deliberate" attack of a UNIFIL position. Since UNIFIL has hidden terrorists for years and allowed terrorists to hide behind them, who cares? This same UNIFIL was responsible for allowing Hiz'b'allah agents to cross the Lebanon/Israeli border and kidnap Israeli soldiers while dressed as UN peacekeepers. The UN had a videotape of the kidnapping that it denied existed for more than six months. Then they admitted it but wouldn't let the Israelis look at it for fear of giving away intelligence information. The UN was frightened that its tiny toy soldiers might be in trouble from the big bad terrorist group they were commanded to disarm. I think I've just discovered one of the reasons why their mission has been so fruitless for anyone but the terrorists.

Then there's corruption. Terrorism pays, and it pays the UN more than almost anyone in the world. Child prostitution? Gotta pay the UN its cut! Oil for food? Check! And how 'bout Rwanda? "Let's go!" wrote General Romeo Dallaire, the UN chief officer who wanted to grab the weapons and prevent the slaughter. "Let's not," was the masterfully terse response from Kofi. So almost a million Tutsis were butchered to death with machetes and Kofi got to be top pimp at the sewer it pleases us to call the UN.
Paul, from Henderson, Nevada, U.S.A. writes in the comments (comment #3) on this report from Arutz Sheva:

Maintaining an office in a declared war zone is proof enough that the UN is deliberately impeding Israel's battle against terrorism. Kofi Annan sits snug in his free luxury salon while pontificating about casualties, but he is the one person who is responsible for the death of the UN reps because he refused to demand their evacuation and instead used them as human shields for Hezbullah.

Olmert does not owe anyone an apology. He is defending his people against Islamic terrorism. Kofi Annan is the one who should get down on his knees and beg forgiveness. His corruption and immorality is in good measure responsible for the war brought to Israel by his Hezbullah friends. Kofi's pious mouthings are to laugh. Viva to the Patriots of Israel from the NON-evangelical Christians for Zion.

Amen, brother! The last thing we need is more UN toy soldier-pimp-drug dealer-intelligence salesmen. Israel should obliterate the real culprit, Syria, thereby liberating Lebanon and isolating Iran.

Duped!

Much of the world is seeing what Hiz'b'allah wants them to see. Check out this article about Anderson Cooper’s story, filed from Beirut.

We'd come to get a look at the damage and had hoped to talk with a Hezbollah representative. Instead, we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah….

Read the whole thing here.

Proportion

Richard Cohen, who I criticized very harshly in this blog for what I felt was a stupid argument (and I stand by that), has written an excellent article for the London Times, reprinted at RealClearPolitics, attacking the notion of proportionality in this war. I would argue that proportionality in war is preposterous in every event for reasons Cohen points out. I can’t help feeling Cohen took some of my post to heart, since he includes so many of my arguments against him. Not that I take credit: he may not have even read my response; but I don’t doubt many others wrote to express the same arguments. In any case, it’s nice to see.

Richard Cohen writes:

Israel has been in dire need of such deterrence ever since it pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 and, just recently, the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, it effectively got into a proportional hit-and-respond cycle with Hezbollah. It cost Israel 901 dead and Hezbollah an announced 1,375, too close to parity to make a lasting difference. Whatever the figures, it does not change the fact that Israeli conscripts or reservists do not think death and martyrdom are the same thing. No virgins await Jews in heaven.

Gaza, too, was a retreat. There are many ways to mask it, but no way to change the reality. The government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon concluded that Israel was incapable of controlling a densely populated area full of people who hated the occupation. Israel will in due course reach the same conclusion when it comes to the West Bank, although the present war has almost certainly set back that timetable. The fact remains that for Israel to survive, it must withdraw to boundaries that are easily defensible and hard to breach.

It's clear now that those boundaries -- a wall, a fence, a whatever -- are immaterial when it comes to missiles. Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed suicide bomber over the border -- all that is needed is the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it's either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.

Readers of my recent column on the Middle East can accuse me of many things, but not a lack of realism. I know Israel's imperfections, but I also exult and admire its achievements. Lacking religious conviction, I fear for its future and note the ominous spread of European-style anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world -- and its boomerang return to Europe as a mindless form of anti-Zionism. Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood. But the world is full of dislocated peoples and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that -- oh, what irony! -- the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. As for Europe, who today cries for the Greeks of Anatolia or the Germans of Bohemia?

These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only state in the Middle East that is a democracy. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel's enemies want that, they can have it in a moment.

(c) 2006, Washington Post Writers Group

Right on, Mr. Cohen. My only disagreement: the anti-Semitism flowers at Israeli weakness, turns into admiration when they are strong.

A State Within A State

Amir Taheri writes in the London Times, reprinted online at NRO Online:

Hezbollah is a state within the Lebanese state. It controls some 25% of the national territory. Almost 400,000 of Lebanon’s estimated 4 million inhabitants live under its control. It collects its own taxes with a 20% levy, known as "khoms", on all incomes. It runs its own schools, where a syllabus produced in Iran is taught at all levels. It also runs clinics, hospitals, social welfare networks and centres for orphans and widows.

The party controls the elected municipal councils and appoints local officials, who in theory should be selected by the central government in Beirut. To complete its status as a virtual state, the party maintains a number of unofficial "embassies": the one in Tehran is bigger and has a larger number of staff than that of Lebanon itself.

Hezbollah also has its own media including a satellite television channel, Al-Manar (the lighthouse), which is watched all over the Arab world, four radio stations, newspapers and magazines plus a book publishing venture. The party has its own system of justice based on sharia and operates its own police force, courts and prisons. Hezbollah runs youth clubs, several football teams and a number of matrimonial agencies.

This is hardly proper democratic behaviour. Would the Democrats create its own army, a series of schools teaching with foreign syllabi (now be quiet, Ann!), embassies in other countries? Hiz'b'allah is a cancer.

Civilians As Weapons

Great post here at TCS Daily; an excerpt:

Those who have visited any Hezbollah installation in Lebanon over the years always remark on the fact that there are families, women and children, in and around the place. "Secret" bases are usually hidden in plain site. Houses or apartment buildings become weapons storage or even operations centers. An innocent shed or garage may contain a Toyota or a missile launcher.

It seems callous to be so dismissive of the deaths of so many civilians but one must keep in mind the fact that, in a war of attrition with Israel, Israel would have to kill 60 Arabs for every Jew in order to survive. Even then, there would be a diminishing rate of returns. One Jew left, for instance, would not beat the 60 remaining Arab. The Arabs have 300 millions; there are only 5 million Jews in Israel. The Muslim world has 1.2 billions. Therefore a "proportionate response" would mean 240 Muslims would need to be killed for every Jew in Israel. All this is quite true if only we accept the theory that the Arab and Muslim world wants to annihilate Israel and the various causus belli that have been used are designed for the prosecution of a war (of annihilation) in stages. It would be easier to feel pity for the Arab mothers of their dead children if only they didn't alternately mourn and celebrate their deaths, depending on whether or not they took Jews with them.

Get A Grip!

Kids signing missiles? Not nice, for sure. Kids being missiles? Palestinian children are indoctrinated to become human bombs by schools, their "government" and their parents, who celebrate when their children die while killing Jews.

It would be easier for me to be sympathetic to the deaths of children in the Arab world if Arab parents didn't alternate between grief and elation over their children's deaths, the difference being whether or not they killed Jews or were killed with them.

The Palestinians are the most morally twisted people on the planet. They got that way mostly through the indifference of their Arab neighbours, who refusaed to allow them to emigrate to their nations. They even, to this day, while professing love for them, refuse even to allow Palestinians born within their borders the rights of citizenship.

The most pressing part of the Palestinian problem is solvable with a single event: an international declaration that all peoples are automatically citizens in the nations of their birth and entitled to all the rights, priviledges, responsibilities and duties of citizenship. Ten minutes later, the incubators of terrorism, the Palestinian "refugee camps" (in business for an obscene 60 years) should be closed. The UN will just have to get its money by selling more child sex slaves: something they're expert in.

Another idea: build something nice but not particularly impressive right across the street from Turtle Bay. Hold regular meetings of the World Democratic States, democracy being the prerequisite for membership. Which way will traffic flow? Which way will prestige flow? It's a no-brainer.

Democrat Two-Step

A thought on Democrat and MSM reaction to George Bush’s NSA telephone data-mining programme. It’s like some kind of Latin American dance step, isn’t it?

Oh no! He didn’t connect the dots. Oh no! he wants to collect the dots!
Oh no! He didn’t connect the dots. Oh no! he wants to collect the dots!
…

Christ Killers!

In a masterpiece of perversion, the Mail & Guardian Online has published an obscenity titled Orgy Of Destruction, implying that Israel's attacks on Hiz’b’allah targets in Lebanon is not only disproportionate (arguable) but that it represents a degenerate feeding of a sexually sadisitic appetite (a lie it implies by the title itself and by comparison to the outstanding psychopathic sadistic regime of all time: Nazi Germany). Similar libels are traditional: early Christians were accused of incestuous orgies, bestiality, blood libels. And the Mail & Guardian is using the same blood libel used against Jews from time immemorial, and repeated in our day by high officers of many Arab nations (like the Syrian Foreign Minister); that Jews feed off the bodies of the young and innocent Christian or Muslim, depending upon the place of origin of the libel.

Whenever the Jew decides not to live under another’s boot, he is accused of killing or denying God and therefore a just target for extermination. I will fisk this deicide myth in this post. But first, a look at the Mail & Guardian’s editorial:

In May 1942, one of the Nazi regime's most notorious mass murderers, Deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated by Czech partisans. The Nazi response was to demolish the nearby village of Lidice house by house and either shoot its inhabitants or send them to death camps.

What, in principle, is the difference between the collective punishment visited on Lidice and the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanese roads, bridges, homes and apartment blocks, telecommunications and power infrastructure, airports, factories, food warehouses and medical facilities by Israeli armed forces?

Not that the Mail & Guardian is interested, but there are a few differences:

1. The Germans had invaded a sovereign nation: Hizb’allah invaded sovereign Israel in an act of war.
2. The Germans were not in hot pursuit; the Germans were not trying to free two of their kidnapped people.
3. The bombings of Israel by Hizb’allah are indiscriminate: the bombings of Hizb’allah’s strongholds by Israel are not. (this is an outright lie in the editorial)
4. The assassins did not live in Lidice; the aggressors of Israel do live, and attack Israel, from Lebanon.
5. The Israelis are not going house to house to murder anybody anywhere. (again: this is an outright purposeful lie.)
6. The Nazis had expressed an explicit desire to destroy an entire race of people and used the power of their state to do so. The Israeli state has never made any such attempt and never will.
7. People (in the Nazi story, remember, it's people who are deliberately killed) are not roads, bridges, homes, telecommunications and power infrastructure, airports, factories, food warehouses, medical facilities...

Charging Israel with acts of genocide are a constant of the feces-throwing crowd. If Israel wanted to commit genocide it could have done so easily. In 1967 the population of the West Bank was 1.5 million. It is now 3.7 million. Clues for identifying genocide: drops in population, not the doubling of it.

It doesn’t surprise me to hear this kind of perverted antisemitc garbage come out of South Africa. Apartheid may have ended, but South Africa is still the moral toilet of the world, though now it's packaged in a new and improved self-righteous variety. In Durban, just days before 9/11, The genocidal "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was freely distributed at a destroy-the-Jews conference that scrupulously avoided any mention of human rights violations by any other country.

The orgy of destruction that was the so-called Human Rights Conference culminated in the ultimate psychopathic sadistic act of our time: the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. From the West Bank to the New Jersey shores, Arabs and Muslims celebrated their Orgy of Destruction. That the Mail & Guardian fishwrap (online version) continues to obsolve terrorists to beat up on the Jews is neither surprising nor edifying. Even the witless knows the smell of blood coming from the pen of a butcher.

But these Jews aren’t likely to lay down and die so that you will love—no—worship them. This is the hypocricy of the Jew hating Christian (if, indeed, such be Christians): "The only good Jew is a dead Jew and he happens to be my personal saviour." The Jews may have had Jesus killed but, clearly, they killed what they took to be a man. "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do." They took him to be an apostate, a usurper of rabbinical authority, perhaps even of priestly power, but it is self-evident that they did not take him to be God.

Christians have, for two millenia, blamed Jews for two mutually exclusive things: for failing to recognize that Jesus was that saviour promised them by their own prophets, and for killing God. Obviously, they cannot be blamed for both. Indeed, it is the "Christian" Jew-hater who lets Jesus--not as-man, but Christ, die in vain every day. It is they who are the deicides, they who are blind Sauls, persecuting, labouring on roads that lead away from Damascus.

Here’s a better "What’s the difference?" question for the twisted anti-Semites on the Mail & Guardian's editorial board: What’s the difference between "Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!" and "Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!" ? It sounds like the same bloodlust to me.

What War Is

From a posting by Bill Faith on Old War Dogs from an e-mail written by "Gene Harrison," (a nom de guerre, like Abu Nudnik). Note what Sergeant Harrison reports on the Basil Faultyesque British education system: "Right. Nothing about the War!" This is how perverted pacifism can get: only by teaching about war do children see the downside of it. The pantywaist education ninnies worldwide eviscerate their very best argument: that war is its own best deterrent!

First of all War is not the resolution of conflict by threat or use of deadly force; that is police work. War is not the final stage of diplomacy. That is diplomacy. War is not establishing defenses against attack—there are no defenses that cannot be breached. Stronger defenses simply change the cost to the enemy of the breach.

War is a national response to a threat of death or destruction to the people or structure (in every sense) of a nation. The purpose of war is to eradicate and so completely destroy the enemy that the threat to the nation disappears. The destruction of an enemy by war includes destroying every asset of the enemy, political, social, religious, economic, psychological, biological, and human. You may choose not to destroy a hospital, but only because it uses the enemies resources that could otherwise be directed toward you. [i.e. used by you later -AN]

Not only must you kill the enemy, you must render it incapable of recovery in any form that had led to the threat or deed that brought war on. The devastation the enemy faces must force complete compliance by the entire enemy polis; civil and military, to our demands that lead to total surrender. I can’t count the number of Churches we shelled into oblivion in Germany. They were terrific artillery observation posts. I can hardly remember whether we killed 150,000 or 200,000 civilians in Dresden, and that was the work of the Greatest Generation. Nagasaki and Hiroshima demonstrated that in the face of overwhelming destruction, an Empire could be brought to heel.

We aimed to destroy every avenue of communication that fostered resistance by the civil population. My battalion alone would have silenced al Jazeera on the first day of an attack. No news reporter who had not been screened and whose reports had not been reviewed by censor were transmitted, either to our homeland or to the enemy. As one of my culture heroes, Winston Churchill said, "we will make them bleed and burn." I wore that patch. My regimental motto was "Death before Defeat."

I note, here in England where I visit my daughter and my five grandchildren, that none of the children have learned in their schools of the Battle of Britain. They find it hard to believe that children like them living in London, where sent away to the North to escape dying by the Blitz, the buzz bombs and V2s of 1940-41, so that a remnant of a great nation would remain. They thrill to hear me speak with praise and reverence of young British airmen, flying their Spitfire "kites," against Messerschmitts and Heinkels.

The Honest Broker

Further to Haroon Siddiqui’s absurd and dishonest essay in the Star a couple of days ago (dishonest because it pretends to care about Mr. Harper’s electability), I thought I should say a thing or two about Canadian diplomacy under the last two Liberal governments.

Under the guise of attempting to be an honest broker in the Middle East, the Canadian government did indeed take sides, and decisively on the side of terrrorists against Israel, for they refused to even consider, even as a motivating factor in Israeli actions, the theory that the Arab states and their proxy armies were determined to exterminate the Jews of Israel and create a Jew-free Palestine.

Axworthy, Manley and Graham all insisted that everyone’s version of the history of the region is equally valid: Israel's, Hizb’allah’s, the PFLP’s, Hamas’s, and they only way forward to peace was by compromise.

But when one side wants all the Jews to be pushed into the Mediterranean and drowned, what is the compromise position? Arrange a UN force to compassionately drown half of them?

The only theory the Candian foreign ministers refused to consider seriously is the genocidal one which history proves to be the accurate one: The Jews, hunted from state to state for centuries, butchered in Europe with either the tacit consent or gleeful participation (brave Denmark excepted) of the entire world (including the Arabs and other Muslims), finally settle in the land of their origin. A compromise to allow them their own state fails through Arab intransigence. The British betray them by setting up the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as the future head of the Palestinian state they are now to live under: the man helped organize the Bosnian SS, the man who lived in Berlin under Hitler’s wing, who promised the Jews of Palestine to Hitler should he win in Europe: that guy. The guy who, in 1940, asked the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right: "... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy." Naturally, the Jews declare unilateral independence and fight for their lives against the British and all the Arab nations.

The Jews continue their fight against a genocidal enemy to this day. The Liberal governments of Chrétien and Martin were far from honest brokers. By denying entirely the Jewish perspective they took a definite side against Israel. The only reason the Liberal governments of the past even recognized Israel was to assuage the national conscience and as a public relations stunt: too sell the idea that Canada was a "moral superpower." All that was to make everyone forget that, when Jews were trying to escape the Holocaust, Canada did nothing.

Mr. Harper has only straightened out the track. Now Canada really is an honest broker.

Does Pacifism Bring Peace?

Thomas Sowell at Townhall.com has a great article called Pacifists versus peace. [article moved to archive; requires membership to access]

As always, Sowell's writing hasn't an ounce of fat and he makes his case simply and clearly. As usual, he's absolutely right. And he's too much of a gentleman to suggest that vanity feeds the delusions of unconditional pacifists: he just thinks they're ignorant because the educational system isn't what it ought to be.

But people educate themselves in spite of schools, not because of them. Schools are mere tools in the hands of the curious. If one wants to know things, one can find them out with a little work, a lot of thought, a bit of moral courage and complete honesty. From Sowell's superlative essay:

If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.

There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia -- not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion"...

and more

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.

"World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent....

Deterrent: there's the operative word. What deterrence is there to war today? No sooner does one party gain an advantage than diplomatic ninnies call for a ceasefire. What for? For the animosity to seethe? For the two sides to reload? Do develop more devastating weapons? Today, Germany and Japan are peace-loving nations, precisely because they know first hand the cost of waging war. And because their defeats were decisive. Israel must do more than clear Hizb'allah to a point beyond their present military abilities -- they must crush them utterly.

The truth is, that the Arab world has been babied by diplomats. They fought on the wrong side of both world wars and for it they expect the spoils of the victors. The Germans haven't asked the French for Alsace and Lorraine because they were soundly beaten and knew it. The Arab world needs, more than anything else, the kind of shellacking that drives home the point that they will never prevail against Israel and that there is a permanent cost to war which one must be prepared to accept before one begins. Only then will the killing end.

Oh No! Political Principle!

Haroon Siddiqui writes his usual pro-terrorist crap in the Toronto (Red) Star in an article titled PM's pro-Israeli tilt could cost him at polls.

Firstly, it’s not a tilt. The POV is straight up: terrorists invade a sovereign state. That state has the right to protect itself. That doesn’t sound tilted to me.

Secondly, since when is a Prime Minister supposed to decide foreign policy based on his election chances? Churchill got nowhere beating the drum before Neville Chamberlain was played the fool by Hitler. Then he got elected. He didn’t beat the drum to get elected but to wake up Chamberlain. It doesn’t matter whether you are elected or not. That’s the beauty of liberal democracies: you can achieve as much out of office as in: by influence.

Here’s an interesting paragraph from the Star:

By falling in lockstep with George W. Bush, the Prime Minister is either displaying his ideological commitment to the president or trying to please him, at any cost — from Afghanistan to Israel. Either way, he is compromising Canadian sovereignty and our reputation for even-handedness, as well as exposing our soldiers to grave risk in the questionable Afghan mission.

overfull, at little green footballs, blogs this response:

Siddiqui is and always has been a terrorist apologist. His sentence:
"Either way, he is compromising Canadian sovereignty and our reputation for even-handedness, as well as exposing our soldiers to grave risk in the questionable Afghan mission." [my emphasis] perverts the meaning of sovereignty. The idea that the PM's statements might put our soldiers at risk from the enemy, and therefore he shouldn't do it, is a statement that seems to posit Canadian sovereignty, not in Parliament, not in the PM, but in the hands of a violent enemy, an enemy that will use violence precisely as a weapon to terrorize people into pressuring governments into enacting policies beneficial to the violent instead of to their own people. His statements carry a veiled threat: they may not quite be treason but they breathe the same fetid air.

I couldn’t hardly say it better myself.

But not to worry; I’ve read Siddiqui for years and he’s never been right before. Hum a tune, brush your teeth, have a sandwich. Harroooooon, haaaahaaaaaaaa, harrooooooon, sing a little song of Harroooooooooooon Siddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiqui.

Oh--one more thing: he's dead wrong: for centuries the policy of Canadian government relations with the US has been formed by a consistent rule: The PM spits out in public what he sucks in private. Dat's for da votes!

Tears for Lebanon

There are a lot of stories about Lebanese suffering these days but not much of it has much context. The Lebanese were victims of a horrible civil war followed by a long occupation by Syria. Israel occupied its south to prevent missiles being fired into its northern towns and farms. It withdrew six years ago. Now Hiz'b'Allah, an Iranian proxy army, has worked toward making the once liberal and fun-loving, tolerant Lebanon into a theocracy after the model of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who founded this group of murderers. Their kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers has now called Israel's wrath upon Lebanon's people.

Israel is defending its country from agression. My guess is that the present aggresion is a missile test Iran has fashioned to prepare for its much anticipated and often-announced nuclear attack on Israel. The kidnapping was a ruse to draw enemy fire. With such fire comes blood. With blood comes propaganda. In the war with Israel, every death has propaganda value in a perverted and psychotic culture where parents celebrate their childrens' deaths in acts of murder.

It's not just a test of weapon systems: it's a test of Israel's will and the international community's support for liberty against fascism and religious tyranny.

The media hasn't seemed to see it this way. It should keep in mind that the best way to avoid civilian casualties is to shorten the duration of war. The worst thing that could happen now is for Israel to let Hiz'b'allah off the hook so that it can reconstitute itself down the road, this time with more dangerous weapons.

Hiz'b'allah must be crushed entirely and its flight followed, if necessary, first to Syria, then to Iran. Many world leaders understand this, even Arab leaders, who have criticized Hiz'b'allah -- an unheard of event.

The prize for moral clarity goes to Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. No other leader has expressed himself so convincingly, so clearly and has analyzed the situation as well. Hiz'b'allah is the agressor and it must tbe crushed. A far cry from the "balanced" point of view of his Liberal predecessors! It's rare that the politicians are ahead of the people, but this time they seem to be.

Go Israel, go. The crushing of Hiz'b'allah is the greatest gift that could possibly be given to the Lebanese people.

An Historical Mistake or an Historian's?

The Washington Post has published an Op-Ed piece so stupid you've got to read it to believe it.

According to Richard Cohen, history is a one-horse horserace. There's only one reason for anything happening, as if history itself were not a debate about whose story would be accepted in the end!

Israel, he writes in his essay called Hunker Down With History, is an historical mistake.Well, I guess the USA is a mistake too. By what right did European Christians come to the Americas?

Oh, what about the Arabian nation of Muhammed's time and since, Mr. Cohen? What right did Muhammed and his followers have to go to Palestine, North Africa, Anatolia, Iberia Russia, France, the Balkans, Austria, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia?

Cohen, unbelievably, seems to be saying that racial purity is the only legitimate raison d' être for nations. Faith is an OK reason for Islam to continue its occupation, its colonialization, its imperialism but Israel? Better hunker down Jew-boy, and take your lickin’, chicken!

Wrong Jew, wrong history. Welcome to Israel: life, joy, struggle, survival. These Jew-boys ain’t waitin’ in line for a de-lousing, you louse, you!

Wow! It’s not surprising that the world gets pissed off when Jews decide to live but it sure is shocking when a Jew like Cohen says so!

Debbie Schlussle, in her post today, says there are 25,000 American green-card holders, mostly dual citizens, in Lebanon. If that’s so, then Canada’s 25,000 Lebanese-Canadians is huge. Canada has only 1/10th of America’s population!

and, says, Schussel, the majority are pro-Hiz'b'allah.

Reminds me of Omar Kadr, "Al Kanadi" (the Canadian) who was Canadian in the free-medical-care sense of the word. Trained with Al-Qaeda, got shot fighting the infidel, got patched up for free in Toronto and got right back on the battlefield where, happily for our side, he died. His family insisted that, being Canadians and therefore free people, they had the right to be in favour of Al-Qaeda ("We are Al-Qaeda, we are an Al-Qaeda family. This is a free country. We can believe as we like." (I quote from memory.)

I hope CSIS has its eye on this and that the Mounties aren't assuming they come from "a broad spectrum" of political values.

How many Lebanese-Canadians who the government are straining to evacuate are Canadian in the free-health-care Omar Kadr sense?

Thank you, Brigitte Gabriel (pictured left), who has written an essay clarifying the history of Hiz'b'allah in Lebanon. Gabriel is a Lebanese Christian, one of thousands who left Lebanon after the civil war between Muslims and Christians facilitated by the PLO and Yasser Arafat. The most interesting passage for me is:

The Lebanese army has less than 10,000 military troops. Hizbullah has over 4,000 trained militia forces and there are approximately 700 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. So, why can't the army do the job? Because the majority of Lebanese Muslims making up the army will split and unite along religious lines with the Islamic forces, just as happened in 1976 at the start of the Lebanese civil war.

It interests me because this passage explains why the Lebanese are not capable of routing Hiz'b'allah (Hiz=the Party, b'=of, allah-God) by themselves. Hence the call from Tony Blair and others to send in an international team to disarm Hiz'b'allah.

It all boils down to a war of Islamic Jihad ideology vs. Judeo-Christian Westernism. Muslims, who are now the majority of Lebanon's population, support Hizbullah because they are part of the Islamic ummah - the nation. This is the taboo subject everyone is trying to avoid.

No matter how much the West avoids facing the reality of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, the West cannot hide from the fact that Hamas and Hizbullah are of the same radical Islamic ideology, which has fomented carnage and death through terrorism, that America and the world are fighting. This is the same Hizbullah that Iran is threatening to unleash in America with suicide bomb attacks if America tries to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They are reported to have cells in over 10 cities in the United States. Hamas has the largest terrorist infrastructure on American soil. This is what happens when you turn a blind eye to evil for decades, hoping it will go away.

Read the Hamas Covenant here.

And a neighbor of mine is concerned that some US Senators get together and pray before sessions! Oy vey! Theocracy's on its way!

Shiite!

Best of the Best of the Best at Opinion Journal. Here's a funny excerpt (but read the whole thing):

…Reuters reports from St. Petersburg, Russia:

A microphone picked up an unaware President Bush saying on Monday Syria should press Hezbollah to "stop doing this [scatological vulgarity]" and that his secretary of state may go to the Middle East soon.

Reuters, which considers terrorism [i.e.the word "terrrorism"] taboo, actually quotes the vulgarity, which we've omitted, in part because this Web site is published by a family newspaper and in part because we're not sure the president didn't actually say "Shiite."

These Shiite stirrings…

Self-congratulations!

I received the following invitation to mindless self-congratulation today, riddled with self-righteous ad hominem attacks (isn't that an oxymoron?). It's written by the Reverend - Captain, I mean - Paul Watson:

From: Paul Watson [mailto:paulwatson@earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 9:26 AMTo: Paul WatsonSubject: Re-Paying Jonah's Debt to the Whale. The importance of Israel's vote at the IWC

Re-Paying Jonah's Debt to the Whale

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

Israel arrived like the proverbial cavalry onto the beaches of St. Kitts and Nevis this year.

Thousands of years after a whale saved Jonah, Israel has returned the favor by helping to save the whales.

After years of economic bullying, bribery, cajoling and arrogant posturing, the Japanese whaling interests had thought they had the votes to form a majority bloc at this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission.

The Japanese delegation arrived in the Caribbean, booked into the best hotels and began to wine and dine their bought and paid for puppet delegates from Mongolia, Senegal, Mali, Togo, and assorted other small nations that recently joined the IWC at the behest of Japan.

The Japanese had counted the heads and were confident of the votes to finally seize majority control of the world's only whaling regulatory body.

But victory was snatched from their hands with the arrival of Israel and the defection of Belize.

Israel did not come to the table because of bribes, they came to save the whales and their enlistment as the 70th member of the IWC stopped the Japanese takeover bid in its tracks.

One of the defeated Japanese resolutions would have allowed commercial hunting of 150 Piked and 150 Byrde whales in the territorial waters of Japan, Iceland and Norway. It was defeated 31-30.

It was the Israeli vote that carried the day for the whales.

Another motion would have removed the prohibition on hunting dolphins and porpoises. The Israeli vote made the crucial difference.

The votes were cast by Esther Efrat, the head of the treaty division at the Foreign Ministry.

"The Israeli position on whaling is clear. Whaling is illegal in Israel and off of Israel's coast. We were bringing our position to the international forum," explained Mark Regev, spokesperson for the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:"Israel has a very strong commitment to environmental matters. We've got a ministry for environmental affairs whose full-time job it is to make sure the environment is looked after. Whaling is illegal in Israel and when we go to the international forum, we are making those opinions known. That's why on the whaling issue we lined up with those who believe whales should be protected," he said.

Israel joined at the last minute after an alert was sent by the US government representatives to Israel's Foreign Ministry urging Israel to join the US againthe plansans by Japan to take over the IWC.

Israel was not bribed but reacted to support an ally on an issue that the Israeli citizens firmly supported. Most of the nations supporting Japan are doing so in defiance of the polls that demonstrate that their citizens are opposed to whaling.

It also made a difference that Belize decided to switch allegiance to the whales and decided to vote against Japan after influential members of the Belize tourist industry pressured their government to vote for the whales. (See earlier posting on the Power of One)

Israel has never had a whaling industry. In fact the Old Testament is very in stating that whale and dolphin meat is prohibited by God.

By joining the IWC Israel has also assumed a position of leadership as a marine conservation nation for the Mediterranean Sea. Israel's own non profit NGO IMMRAC is devoted to protecting whales, dolphins and porpoises.Mia Elasar, a committee member at IMMRAC said that she hopes Israel's participation in the IWC will mean the country will put its heart into local issues, such as those addressed by ACCOBAMS Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area)."The recent vote against whaling is expected to put Israel on the local map. It shows us that there is a place to really vote for preserving Mediterranean marine mammals," said Elasar, who hopes Israel will take the reigns and lead awareness to marine conservation."There [at ACCOBAMS] we can really make an impact. This authority will affect seals and dolphins, which are a threatened species in the Mediterranean more because of fishing and less of hunting.""There are whales in the Mediterranean," Elasar confirms. "There are six species to be found off the Israeli coast. The main problem with conservation of marine mammals is that their reproductive rates are slow. What we are doing now we will only get back in 10 or 20 years. The animals will disappear if we don't watch it."The Mediterranean is home to the world's second highest percentage of endemic species, including the Posidonia sea grass and the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seal. Species also include 28 cetaceans, the loggerhead turtle, and the blue-fin tuna and swordfish. But currently, less than 1% of the Mediterranean is protected.

Captain Watson, Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972), Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979), Director of the
Sierra Club USA (2003-2006), Director - The Farley Mowat Institute, Director - www.harpseals.org, Director - Ocean Outfall Group of California Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film Festival Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine

Whom when I asked from what place he came,

And hoheight hi himselfselfe he did ycleepe shepherdheard of the Ocean by Name,

And said he came far from the
main-sea deepe.

- Edmund Spenser A.C.E. 1590

www.Seashepherd.org Tel:
360-370-5650; Fax: 360-370-5651

Address: P.O. Box 2616, Friday Harbor,
Wa 98250, USA ______________________________________

My Response:

Gee. I sure hope we don't break our arms patting ourselves on the back.

Interesting to note that Captain Paul Watson, Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977, Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972), Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979), Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006), Director - The Farley Mowat Institute, Director - www.harpseals.org, Director - Ocean Outfall Group of California, Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film Festival, Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine spends most of his article impugning the reputations of each and every state that voted with Japan while completely ignoring claims that the moratorium on whale hunting is no longer necessary, that the growing populations of whales threaten the krill stock on which they depend, and that the number of new whales allowed to be hunted represents a reasonable number not threatening to the species as a whole, culls and improves the stock while providing benefit for people. If these arguments are true, should the whales die from lack of food or should the herd be culled?

I'll be damned if I know if any of this is true and that's just the point: I'd prefer to see a reasoned argument based on science than this kind of self-congratulatory nullity whose purpose is clearly to circumnavigate the reason and go straight to where unquestioning pride lurks. I hate being played.

I'm no expert but it's pretty clear what effects the growing seal populations have had on fish stocks and the Canadian fishery. Maybe the cod stock did diminish solely (!) due to human overfishing and maybe it didn't. All I know is that the Sea Shepherd Society et al take a pretty consistent view that all activity of humans to feed themselves must of necessity adversely effect the environment. This missive should be looked at keeping this bias in mind and the aforementioned one: ad hominem attacks instead of sound scientific questions and answers should be taken suspiciously as purposeful attempts to sway the reason through the emotions.

I'd copy the Reverend Watson -- I mean Captain Watson -- but I don't see an address.

___________________________________________________

Oops! Wrong about the last sentence: his email is at the top of the email!

Conservative Voice has blogged an over-the top encomium to Canada to which I take exception. Here is the link and my reply.

Don’t thank us for what we ought to be doing. The war is not half a world away, it is the heartland of Canada; in Toronto, Al Qaeda cells fester. I saw them in the weeks approaching 9/11 on the sidewalks half a block from me, going to and from the Islamic Centre in Parkdale, increasingly haughty, increasingly arrogant. “Who the hell do they think they are?” I remember muttering to myself. They knew, I tell you. They knew. And when it was done they rejoiced, not as in Gaza with guns, but quietly, like a miser who has scored a windfall but doesn’t want his neighbours to know. Any nation who refuses to fight such a callous and disgusting enemy with every weapon at its disposal is not worthy of the name.

Canada is not a loyal ally of the US and did not go anywhere, much less Afghanistan, without fanfare. With great bitchiness, I remember the prime minister (Jean Chretién) complaining that George Bush didn’t mention Canada in his speech but only England and Australia. Canada came late to the table because it wanted Americans first to fawn over us for opening up our airports to your stranded planes, and our homes to the passengers. Since when is common decency something to be lauded? What a world! What was the alternative? Let the planes fall to earth? Let people starve at the airport? Sure, Newfoundlanders are the best. Salt of this earth, man, I tell you. But all you gotta be for them to love you is human. It was nothing special. They’re always like that and that’s why it’s an insult to praise them for just being themselves, for being daysant (=decent in Newfie).

Canada (at the time of which we speak—there have been undeniable signs of hope since the Conservative minority government under Stephen Harper took over) has been more like a bitchy auntie than an uncle — the crazy one who lives in the basement and complains about the smells and every coming and going — mostly about being left alone and ignored. But who shuts her up in her room? She herself. She could have a life but she doesn’t. Instead she sits in the moral centre of the universe and contemplates “what makes us us,” to quote a line from an Air Miles commercial that expresses the shallowness, the narcissism of this nation. Did I say nation? Country, rather: a country without a song that sends shivers up your spine, without a God, without an army worth speaking of (admittedly that is improving, thank God). We were real players once, with the 4th largest army in the world and an unblemished record of courage, boldness, fearlessness and honour. I weep with rage and frustration to think of it! Once she lived. Now she passes judgement and rots.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate your sentiment; I appreciate that you mention our fallen soldiers but other than that, dammit, you soil our honour with your praise!