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Melanie Philips:

...But Russia’s weakness carries a dire warning for us, too. For the west is also weak, in its ignorance, prejudice and gullibility. Terrorism only became such a potent weapon of war because the west allowed it to happen. From the first plane hijacks in the sixties, the west showed weakness by refusing to confront the perpetrators and even rewarding them by paying attention to their purported grievances.
When the US was repeatedly attacked by Islamic terrorism throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it merely sat on its hands, made token responses, or decided to cut and run. Osama bin Laden concluded from this that the US was weak. We know this because he said so. And so he unleashed 9/11.
But instead of learning the correct lesson that the current horrors are the result of such a failure to act, the west has succumbed to historical amnesia over those previous attacks. It is convulsed instead by hysteria over the war on Iraq, with absurd conspiracy theories about Zionists and ‘neo-conservatives’ surfacing instead almost daily in the mainstream media and driving out rational debate.
And so the terrorists carefully calibrate their atrocities to exploit such weakness, confident that for every outrage it is not they but America which will be blamed. Those whipping up this hysteria, therefore, have blood on their hands.
As President Putin has said, ‘the weak are always beaten’. Unless the west wakes up from its trance and starts realising who are its true allies and who its true enemies, the scenes of anguish in Russia will be merely the prelude to an unthinkable defeat.

Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of good stuff that is worthy attention. I keep separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris, David Warren, Orson Scott Card. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/ September 6, 2004

Blood on their hands

Classic example of appeasenik idiocy and moral vacuity by Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian about the Beslan massacre. Having observed that terrorism is getting nastier, he opines that the last thing that should be done is to use force against it. Those who do are guilty of 'savagery' and 'vengeance'. The idea that such actions might be designed to stop the terror is not entertained. Indeed, Hastings tells us breathlessly that the real purpose of terror is to produce a reaction from the victims that will recruit yet more to the cause. You don't say!
So what should folks who are being fried in bus bombs or whose children are slaughtered in schoolrooms do instead? Why, 'undramatic, even invisible means: intelligence, politics, diplomacy, special forces operations '. Uh huh. Like those aren't used already? And what happens when they fail to persuade the terrorists to pack up their bomb belts and go home? Hastings says force never works. But where in the world has his approach ever worked?
A little detail like that is, of course, irrelevant. For Hastings, killing terrorists is the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes. And of course, Israel is branded accordingly for attempting to protect its citizens. This is described as 'venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people'. As for President Bush, he 'indulges both Ariel Sharon and Putin in any means they see fit, to suppress those who use terrorist methods, without heed to the need for diverse political responses, as well as sensitive military tactics'.
Now, Putin's brutal repression of the Chechen revolt hasn't been clever at all, not least because Russia has long been supplying money and arms to the very people who promote the Islamic jihad -- of which, as Putin now realises far too late, the Chechen resistance is the North Caucasus branch office. Not that Hastings grasps this -- indeed, he expliclty rejects the obvious fact that Palestinian, Chechen or al Qaeda terror are part of the same phenomenon.
But his remarks about Israel are as spiteful as they are ignorant. He suggests that Israel has never attempted any political resolution of its conflict with the Palestinians -- thus totally ignoring the fact that the current intifada was their response to a political process in which Israel was offering them a state of their own. What hate-filled malevolence is this, that can so distort and misrepresent an issue, and make criminals out of the victims of a death cult of annihilatory totalitarianism?
The fact is, as I wrote in my article for the Daily Mail today, the single greatest incentive for acts of terrorist mass murder is the response of those who blame the terrorised rather than the terrorist, respond to every act of mass murder by signalling yet greater weakness, demoralisation and fear, and make it worth the terrorists' while to ratchet up the violence. It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west's response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. Hastings concludes that terrorism is winning. Very true -- but only when it results in attitudes like his own