Posted on 01/05/2009 6:51:51 PM PST by SeekAndFind
he moment Israel began its war of defense against the missiles being fired at her citizens from Hamas launching pads in Gaza, the United Nations, the communist and dictatorship countries, the Europeans and the Arab/ Muslim states began their predictable condemnation of Israel. Though not as severe as those just mentioned, Pat Buchanan embarked on a journalistic blitz with the similar goal of stopping Israel from defeating its terrorist attackers and asking the upcoming Obama administration to declare it will not support Israel.
Buchanan ("Bush, Obama, and the Gaza Blitz", 12/30/08, HUMAN EVENTS) questions “the wisdom of so savage a retribution for rockets that killed not one Israeli.” That, of course, is just wrong. At least 14 Israelis had been killed by Hamas rockets since 2001, and the Hamas attacks had intensified to more than sixty rockets per day just before Israel counter-attacked by airstrikes.
Had Israel’s interest been retribution, it could have quickly leveled all of Gaza. Instead, Israel first confined its attack to military and launching sites and the Hamas leadership engineering the rocket and suicide bomb attacks.
Now, as the ground incursion proceeds, Israel is continuing to take humanitarian measures above and beyond the call of its duty. As Shimon Peres said last weekend, “The operation was planned carefully and the army was true to its principles: namely, to be precise in its targets and careful not to hit civilian life. There is a problem because many of the bombs were stored in private houses. We have contacted the owners of the houses, the people that dwell there, and told them leave it. You can't live with bombs. We have to bring an end to the source of the bombs.”
Clearly this operation is being run as a defensive measure only, with the aim of once-and-for-all sparing Israeli children, schools and townsfolk from daily shelling. But in a twisted move, Buchanan accuses Israel of a "premeditated and planned blitz" -- as if Israel cunningly forced Hamas to shell Israeli citizens.
Buchanan is incorrect in stating that no Israeli has died from the 5,000 bombs of Hamas. But beyond that, he is well aware of the dozens of Israelis who have been permanently blinded and crippled by Hamas rockets and the hundreds of children terrorized and scarred for life after being repeatedly shaken from their sleep beds as they run through the night to bomb-shelters. Are ruined lives and suffering by a population not reason enough for a country to respond conclusively?
Regardless of how many are killed, when a foreign entity invades a country and its citizens within, that country’s government must respond to those acts of war by doing whatever must be done to stop the invasion from happening again. Would Pat Buchanan be as accepting if the target was Arlington, Virginia and the maimed shoppers from Tyson’s Corner? But so lightly does he evidently feel about Jewish suffering that the rationale he gives for Israel's strong response is "crass Israeli politics".
The following question needs to be asked of the Arab/Muslim countries as well as the Europeans: What is the appropriate number of Jewish lives that must first be lost before retaliation is permissible -- is it five, or 25, or should the bar be set at six million?
Naturally, as Buchanan knows, when a first-rate military power decides to finally unleash a portion of its power, the explosiveness of its bombs may seem “savage” in comparison to the Katyusha type rockets used by lesser powers.
While working in the White House, Pat Buchanan ignored the accusation by Leftists and Jesse Jackson that America was guilty of using disproportionate power when freeing our students in Grenada. He rebuked the Leftist notion that a first-rate military power is somehow required to reduce itself to a third-rate backward power so as to be “fair.” No nation should, in the name of proportionality, accede to reducing its military power to that of its enemy unless it desires a never ending, ongoing conflict of parity.
Buchanan asks “Obama to denounce the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.” Buchanan, not a man of the Left, uses the all too familiar phraseology employed by the Left whenever it wishes to stop the U.S. and our allies from using air power. Israel has pinpointed it targets to military sites, but Hamas is barbarically, and cynically, placing its Gazan citizens at launching sites so critics of Israel, including Buchanan, can talk of collective punishment.
This is a ruse that Buchanan did not fall for back in the days when he wrote of the cynical ploy of the communists in Southeast Asia using their own people as shields and their exploitation of the media and cameras for their propaganda and appeals to “humanitarianism”.
His accusation that “Israelis have a policy of withholding from the innocent of Gaza the necessities of life” is libelous. To her own detriment, Israel has allowed fuel, food and electricity into Gaza all the years Hamas has been shelling her, even though those necessities were directed by Hamas, and before that the Palestinian Authority, first to the terrorists striking at Israel. Instead of raising false claims against Israel, the more important question is why Israel has succumbed to an excessive compassion that has supplied Hamas with the very rope used to hang Israel.
Buchanan is quick to grant blanket “innocence” to the Arab Palestinians living in Gaza, though they willfully voted for Hamas that campaigned on its charter to destroy Israel and destroy the Jews living in Israel. Much of that population is joyously engaged in raising an entire generation to hate Jews, Christians and infidels and has decided to use its energy and finances not to build a Gazan/Palestinian Arab State but to wipe out Israel -- and later the West.
Hamas and Hizbollah are Al Quaeda by a different name. Israel has been the first target of the jihad whose ultimate goal is to destroy America, the Great Satan. In our war against terror, Buchanan writes that we should not be an Empire but a Republic, i.e., we engage in no nation building and fight only those who have attacked us. Yet in her war against terror, Buchanan condemns Israel though it has expressed no territorial ambitions for Gaza and is limiting its fight to only that entity which continues to, even today, attack her.
Buchanan asserts that “our values” are at stake and “Obama should declare the United States will no longer support Israel with tax dollars”. In other words, he is asking that as a condition for Israel receiving continued American support, Israel choose the welfare of the Hamas-supporting citizens over the lives of her own people, who look to the army as the single entity that will protect them.
I cannot believe that Buchanan’s values require punishing a nation for choosing the survival of its people over others who have voted to destroy it. It seems to me that it is Pat who has veered from the real conservative position --- neo, regular and paleo.
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Mr. Spero is a radio talk show host, and president of Caucus for America. He can be reached at www.caucusforamerica.com.
Pat lives in the illusion that at the end of the day the Arab Muslim miltants are “not” against even people like him...
Buchanan is missing part of his brain.
Pat was at one time pro Israel.
Pat is mostly wrong about everything, all the time.
Pat was
Hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars annually go to outright terrorist organizations (the PLO, Fatah, and indirectly Hamas), and Buchanan is silent. But helping Israel - the only western democracy in the region and one of the few nations on earth willing to take the fight to Islamofascists - somehow just burns Pat up.
Patsy is a great political analyst, but is out near Chomskyville sometimes on Foreign Policy. Hey Pat, did you know that our common hero, Robert Taft, was an early supporter of Israel?
Pat Buchanan believes that the USA need not have sacrificed lives for Europe.
He asked the following questions ( and I quote ) :
“When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?
If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a “smashing” success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.
If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.
Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?
The war Britain and France declared to defend Polish freedom ended up making Poland and all of Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. And at the festivities in Moscow, Americans and Russians were front and center, smiling – not British and French. Understandably.”
Last I heard, we were only up to about 550.
More of the same type.
The Third Party loons and Paleos are right out of DU
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2159131/posts?page=91
Ron Paul: Israel had US OK for war on Gaza (Ron Paul sides with Hamas)
Biblical times?
“Pat was at one time pro Israel.”
Compared to the American Jew, Pat is a downright Zionist!
I have been reading a fair amount of Richard Maybury’s work recently and do understand what you are saying. Maybury also says that if we had stayed out, Russians would have taken out the Germans easily. There did not need to be a second front.
Gee. Yathink?
I respectfully disagree. I think it is important to hear various perspectives. I am not reading articles to feed my confirmation bias. I want to be challenged. I think Pat Buchanan is a very smart man and is often spot on in his observations. This is not one of those times. I am not even certain Pat even believes what he wrote. Pat is an old political operative and he could be baiting Obama.
I would not be so quick to say that.
Pat sure promotes a lot of leftist ideas.
Pat was at one time pro Israel. Somewhere along the line, he switched and turned into a Pro Arab activist.
Selected Quotations from columns by Patrick J, Buchanan
*On the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, 6/25/82
“Politically, mankind suffered no irreversible loss with the sweeping of the PLO from the international chess board. As virulently anti-American as it was anti-Israeli, the PLO has been a Soviet cat’s-paw, the linchpin of international terror, the base camp for the worst elements on earth, a friend to every enemy of the United States from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to Idi Amin in Uganda.”
*On the state of Israel, 1983
“Israel remains a tough, resourceful, energetic nation, an offspring of the West . . . whose current struggle merits sympathy and support.”
*On the Israeli strike against Iraqi nuclear reactor, 6/11/81
“From a security perspective, the Israelis’ preemptive strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor outside Baghdad was timely and crucial.
..Given the implacable hatred of Baghdad for Israel— the nation is referred to only as “The Zionist Entity” — the prospect, indeed, the probability of atomic weapons in Iraqi hands, was one with which the Israelis literally could not live.
..righteous United States condemnation of Israel, a small sliver of land with three major cities, rings hollow. How, for example, would we expect President Reagan and Secretary of State Haig to act if weapons-grade material were being fed into a Soviet-built Cuban reactor, with Castro declaring: ‘This one is for the Yankees.
..what Israeli could go to sleep secure with revanchist Palestinians a few miles away nursing their hatred of the ‘Zionist imperialists’ who destroyed their homeland and drove their fathers and mothers into refugee camps?”
*On the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, 12/17/85
“It would not be at all unreasonable if the Israelis came to the conclusion that their survival, more than ever, depends upon themselves alone. If a majority in that country have arrived at such a conclusion, it is natural to seek security in geography and guns, not treaties and talk.
..The militants — Syria, Libya, Iraq, the military wing of the PLO — will settle for nothing less than eradication of the “Zionist entity” from the Arab world. Within Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, there are millions more for whom the humbling and destruction of the Jewish state is a nightly dream. Even the “moderate” governments in the region — Egypt, for example — could probably not survive a permanent peace which left East Jerusalem under Israeli control.”
My source is the Buchanan Press release in 1996 shown on the following website:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/b/buchanan-pat/buchanan-on-buchanan.html
No- Buchanan is just like Bush I who refused to allow Israel to defend themselves during the first gulf war. He doesn’t hate Jews or even Israel, he just finds their existence to be problematic to his ideas of Mid East policy-pacify the Arabs and keep the oil flowing.
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