Posted on 07/24/2006 1:39:50 AM PDT by goldstategop
In war innocents pay a heavy price. There is no way to fight a war without “collateral damage” to civilians unless the opposing armies agree to meet in a desert and let the superior force prevail. It certainly cannot be done when the aggressor is a terrorist army that deliberately places its headquarters, its weapons depots, its missile launchers and its staging bases in the middle of large urban centers like Beirut, or in the small villages abutting the border of its victims.
Sometimes the death of innocents comes not from collateral damage but from the deliberate targeting of civilians – as is almost invariably the case with terrorist armies like Hezbollah and Hamas. In World War II wherever the Wehrmacht went, Jews were rounded up for the slaughter. Guernica and Lidice are the names of innocent towns with no military value that were deliberately destroyed by the fascists. Sometimes innocents are targeted even by civilized armies with military ends in view. The allied bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians for military reasons. The allied bombings were designed to break the morale of the enemy and to end the war, and save millions of lives. They did, and we can all be grateful for that (or at least the honest among us can).
Critics of Israel’s defensive war against Islamic terrorists are busily wringing their hands over the destruction that has been wreaked on Lebanon and its inhabitants, who are portrayed as innocent bystanders. They invoke these tragedies while calling on Israel to cease its fire and leave the Hezbollah aggressors intact. Since Israel had no role in starting this war, this is like blaming the Allies for the damage inflicted on Germany in World War II – and doing so in the midst of the war. Critics who make such charges and demands in the midst of a war are aiding and abetting the aggressors.
But the very idea that Lebanon is an innocent bystander in the war against Israel won’t wash. Lebanon is host to the terrorist aggressor which has sworn to eliminate Israel and its Jews from the face of the earth. This is the explicit creed of both Hezbollah and its sponsor Iran. And not just in their charter or in statements made months or years ago. Iran’s little dictator reiterated the threat even yesterday in the midst of Islam’s aggressive war against the Jews: “Israel has pushed the button of its own destruction. The Zionists made their worst decision and triggered their extinction by attacking Lebanon." Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, occupying two cabinet positions and seats in its parliament. The Lebanese government agreed to enforce UN Resolution 1559 which calls on it to disarm all militias on its territory, namely Hezbollah. If the Lebanese Government had performed this obligation, there would be no war, and there would be no Lebanese civilian casualties.
Instead the Lebanese government allowed Hezbollah to build its headquarters and underground bunkers in the populated neighborhoods of Beirut. It allowed Hezbollah to import 13,000 missiles to be fired into Israel’s cities and towns. The 75,000-man Lebanese army has not sealed off the Syrian border and, according to reports, has allowed Syria to re-supply Hezbollah in the midst of its aggression. The Lebanese government has allowed Hezbollah to build underground fortresses on its southern border in position to attack. It has allowed Hezbollah to launch rockets into the towns of northern Israel to terrorize and kill innocent civilians.
Israel has done nothing to provoke this attack from Lebananese territory. But in the midst of Hezbollah’s aggression against Israel, Lebanon’s prime minister has joined the attackers, blaming Israel for Lebanon’s misery instead of its source.
It will be objected that Lebanon is helpless, that its democracy was destroyed and its territory conquered by the PLO, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. It will be said that the Lebanese cannot resist the superior force of Hezbollah’s “state within a state.” But this is an argument in bad faith. No one is helpless. When France was occupied by Germany during World War II, DeGaulle organized the “free French” into a fighting force. The so-called “Cedar Revolution” showed that there are ways of manifesting opposition and resistance to the occupiers. Even though it failed, it showed that resistance is possible. If there is resistance to Islamic terror in Lebanon today, it is as invisible than moderate Islam. Put bluntly, while the Lebanese have demonstrated their resistance to the Syrian occupier in the very recent past, there has been no evidence of it when the aggressor is an Islamic force bent on obliterating the Jews.
The Lebanese army has not lifted a finger to obstruct Hezbollah’s aggression, but the Lebanese prime minister has been out front in attacking Israel. Who, watching the Lebanese interviewed by reporters during the war – including the Lebanese Americans evacuated to safety – can doubt that their hatred is for Jews and not for the Islamic killers of both the Jews and the Lebanese.
These attitudes do not make the Lebanese deserving of the war that Hezbollah and Iran have inflicted on them; but it does not make them innocent either. Hezbollah's Shi'ite fanatics are Lebanese. Over the last twenty years Hezbollah has become an integral part of Lebanese society and Lebanon's government. All the while Hezbollah has sworn to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. If war has come to Lebanon, no one can pretend that they didn't see it coming.
The last stand of Western imperialism is the patronizing attitude displayed by Western radicals and liberals toward Third World Muslims and Arabs. If Americans taught their children to murder Muslims as a quick pass to heaven, the left would regard this as a crime against humanity. But if Palestinians are the perpetrators of such crimes and Jews are the targets, it’s a different story. In this case terror is the only means (and therefore the understandable means) of a “desperate” people. Jews who have been told by Iran and Hezbollah that their extinction is imminent of course aren’t desperate.
Hassan Nasrallah is not a victim, let alone a helpless one; nor is he stupid, or unaware of what he is doing. He knows just what his agenda is. “There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel” he told a crowd of supporters. “I promise Israel that it will see more suicide attacks, for we will write our history with blood.” His supporters responded with chants of “Death to Israel, death to America.” Counseling the Israelis to lay down their arms in the face of these threats and negotiate with a movement that seeks their destruction is a not so surreptitious support for the malignant agendas themselves.
Making excuses for Lebanese appeasement of these agendas while directing moral outrage against the intended victims repeats a familiar pattern among leftist critics of America and Israel. In weighing in on the frontline battles against the terrorists in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, critics attribute civilian casualties not to the terrorists but to their opponents; liberation and self-defense are denounced as “occupation.” This is not even moral equivalence; it is sympathy for the devil.
Until the arrival of Arafat and the Palestinian terrorists, Lebanon was a Christian democracy. But Islamic radicalism could not tolerate either Christianity or democracy. This – not the presence of tiny Israel (one hundred times smaller than its current antagonists) is the root cause of the violence in the Middle East. The cause is Arab intolerance and Islamic hate. One Jewish state among 22 Arab states was one too many. Six million Jews among 300 million Arabs was too much to bear. A sliver of land, less than one percent of the Arab land mass, which belonged to first to the Turks and then to the British was an imperialist outrage. Lebanon, a country raped by the Syrian-Iranian axis and the Palestinians has become an integral component of the terrorists’ war plan to push the Middle Eastern Jews, who have lived continuously for 3,000 years in the region, into the sea. Lebanon is a tragedy of the 58-year Arab war against Israel, against democracy, and against Christianity in the Middle East. But it is not innocent.
Unfortunately, any literal reading of the Satanic Verses puts you in the "not moderate" camp. The slilence from the moderates is defeaning. The German population weren't all Nazis but we took the war to them as well. Winning means destroying your enemy's will to continue to fight. As long as the moderate continue to "ignore" the Islamonazis in their midst then they can expect to suffer from the Islamonazis actions. Sad but true.
bump for later
“Israel has pushed the button of its own destruction. The Zionists made their worst decision and triggered their extinction by attacking Lebanon."
Wow, he has described his own fate and he doesn't know it.
Tancredo gave an excellent speech recently stating this very premise. His stock went up with me after the speech. I thought he only knew about immigration.
A perfect description of The Tenth Plague.
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.
also Keywords 2006israelwar or WOT [War on Terror]
----------------------------
Hezbollah's Iranian War in Iraq
By Dr. Walid Phares
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 24, 2006
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23503
(Snip)
The Jihadi Syro-Iranian offensive started simultaneously in early 2005, with the Hariri assassination in Lebanon and the selecting of Mahmoud Ahmedinijad as head of the Islamic Republic in Tehran. In Lebanon and as the pro-Syrian Government collapsed, new elections were held and an anti-Syria majority was established, Hezbollah executed a sophisticated one year plan in preparation for the war launched in July 2006.
It began with Nasrallah imposing on the Seniora Government a strange offer: taking three members of the Party into his cabinet, while Hezbollah maintains a strategic relation with Syria’s regime. That success brought other moves forward. For six months, political leaders and journalists of the Cedars Revolution were assassinated with car bombs: Samir Qassir, George Hawi and Gebran Tueni.
This sufficed to convince the anti-Syrian politicians that any serious obstruction of the Iranian-Syrian axis and opposition to Hezbollah will be “punished.” The terror treatment seemed to have worked, as the Government was forced to abandon the implementation of UNSCR 1559 and have its components sit down with Hezbollah to “discuss” the future of its weapons.
In short, it took Nasrallah and his allies less than a year to contain and weaken the Cedars Revolution and the Government it has produced."
(snip)
You do understand that there are no cash prizes for the stupid statement of the day.
Check out this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1671205/posts
We are all in agreement with that, I think.
Alas, the real problem is identifying it!
The allied bombings were designed to break the morale of the enemy and to end the war, and save millions of lives. They did, and we can all be grateful for that (or at least the honest among us can).
Says it all.
The Left, as usual, is on the wrong side of truth and justice.
Some of us have no trouble at all identifying it... "Dirty little secret: we're at war with Islam, which means Muslims"
Ping!... As always, great points from Horowitz...Thanks for the article.
Dr. Walid Phares Always worth reading anything he has to say. Weather a person agrees with him or not he's (IMO) someone to pat attention to.
It is getting increasingly difficult not to count those Muslims who stand by indifferently, while the active terrorist hide among them, as enemies. The Lebanese in the border areas know damn well where the Hizbollah arms caches, bunkers, and members are. They are complicit. If their religion is being "hijacked", they are doing very little to liberate it. Indeed, they seem content to let it be.
"The enemy is Islamofascists who have hijacked a religion for their own purposes."
Guess the Baptists should hijack Christianity and start preaching that Christians should kill all Muslims so that Christ will be the only God worshiped on planet Earth. I'm sure people who think like you would give Christians a pass if they allowed the Baptists to start beheading Muslims in order to install Christianity as the only religion allowed by the government.
David Horowitz nails it good with a great big hammer ping!
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