Thought Experiment
The truce in Gaza may be over almost before it began. Sky News reports “Israel had earlier agreed to halt its campaign against militants in the Hamas-run territory during his brief visit. But Sky’s Middle East Producer Tom Rayner said: ‘We’ve seen at least 4 rockets launched from Northern Gaza in the last 10 minutes – ceasefire may be over before it has even really begun.’” Does it matter who breaks a ceasefire?
Does being the weaker party absolve it of the need for forbearance. There is a school of thought which holds that the Palestinians are burning with such righteous anger that they cannot be expected to show restraint. Stephen Walt writes in Foreign Policy: “What if powerful Palestinians were bombing weak Israelis?” Then the Israelis would understand how hard it would be to hold back.
And please: The issue is not about whether Israel has the right to defend itself. Of course it does. But what it doesn’t have is the right to use disproportionate force in order to maintain an unjustified and illegal occupation and the subjugation of millions of Palestinians, which is the taproot from which these events spring.
Walt’s rhetorical question can be phrased equivalently: if the Palestinians had as much firepower as the IDF and the Israelis had as much firepower as the Hamas, how long would the weak Israelis survive? Perhaps they would survive as long as the Palestinians simply because enlightened persons like Stephen Walt and Samantha Power would intervene to prevent a genocide.
They would shame a powerful Palestine into treating a weak Israel well. But the unfortunate fact is that the United Nations did not prevent or stop the Cambodian, Rwandan or Kosovar massacres. They do not even recognize the Darfur Conflict as a genocide. They are unable, as of the present time, to stop the killings in Syria, estimated to have claimed 50,000 victims to date. The Rwandan genocide occurred in fact under the very noses of UN Peacekeepers.
History appears to show that the physical ability of the UN to prevent a massacre is quite limited. What success it may have in tempering conflict largely depends largely on the character of the militarily dominant party. Diplomats can “stop” Israel with words because the Israeli state is responsive to legalities and words. It cannot stop Assad because the Syrian government is not responsive to the same persuasion.
Hence, the fate of a “weak Israel” under a powerful Palestine will be determined by by the character of Hamas. Would a Hamas in the possession of armored vehicles, artillery, missiles, aircraft and nuclear weapons restrain itself? Would it listen to Stephen Walt and Samantha Power?
One proxy test of this proposition is to examine with what restraint Hamas treats the inhabitants of Gaza. According to the New York Times, Human Rights Watch “accused Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that governs the Gaza Strip, of running a criminal justice system rife with arbitrary arrests, torture and unfair trials.” The HRW report says:
Based on interviews with former detainees, lawyers, human rights groups, and reviews of case files and court judgments … Hamas security services in Gaza routinely conduct arrests without presenting warrants, refuse to promptly inform families of detainees’ whereabouts, deny detainees access to a lawyer and torture detainees in custody.
… As a measure of how broken the system is, three criminal defense lawyers in private practice told Human Rights Watch that they had themselves been arbitrarily arrested and tortured in detention by Hamas security forces …
This report does not attempt to compare abuses by Hamas with abuses by the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank, where Human Rights Watch has also documented arbitrary arrest, torture and impunity.
In brief, Hamas shows no mercy to its enemies. Or at least, very little. On the assumption that Hamas is unlikely to treat Jewish persons any better than Muslim Arab bretheren, it is possible, perhaps even plausible to say that a weak Israel at the living at the sufferance of a powerful Palestine may not fare very well.
It may be objected that Walt’s hypothetical experiment can never be settled with certainty until history presents observers an actual instance of a Jewish population wholly at the mercy of a hostile force. There are of course examples which may guide opinion, though they are all from the 20th century. The 21st is different, isn’t it? We have the United Nations and the International Community now.
The real logical flaw in Walt’s reasoning is that the proper metric is not “power” versus “weakness”. The real contrast is not weak versus strong but civil society versus authoritarian tyranny. Israel is a fundamentally democratic society that happens to be militarily powerful. Hamas happens to be a despotic organization which happens to be weak.
The fundamental defect of Hamas from a human rights point of view is not that is weak, but that is evil. The fundamental virtue of Israel is not that it possesses the “Iron Dome”, but that it is basically a law-abiding society. Hamas thinks its defects can remedied by more military power, just as perhaps Walt thinks Israel’s moral authority can be increased by disarmament, but the thinking is false.
If Hamas broke the ceasefire it agreed to it did not do so because it was weak. It did so because it was a treacherous. That is the fundamental difficulty, one that will not be amended by simply arming them further.
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
Tip Jar or Subscribe or Unsubscribe
The relatively “moderate” in scare quotes, that is to say pliably corrupt as compared to the impliably corrupt Hamas, PLO administration on the West Bank has overseen the depopulation of Bethlehem of 90% of its Christians and their replacement by Islamic placeholders. The Islamist plan for the Jews is extermination. Their model is what happened at Yathrib in 627 where all the Jewish men were who surrendered were killed and the women enslaved and what happened in Khaybar in 629 which lead to expulsion. Look them up. The Islamist chant is, “Khaybar, Khaybar o Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.”
Israel needs to practice the Toothpaste Tube strategy on Gaza. From the Northeast corner reoccupy 1/16th mile every day that violence emanates from the Strip. Permanently destroy every structure in reoccupied territory and expel all inhabitants. They must be relentlessly methodical, like a giant machine.
My expectation is that in their despair and folly the Islamists will destroy the Aswan High Dam. That will result in a flood that will make Cairo uninhabitable. At least 10 million people are likely to die if that happens. Hopefully at the first notice that the Dam is breaking the US will move to rescue the antiquities in the Cairo Museum. They are part of the priceless heritage of mankind.
W: another excellent dissection of the fatuities with which evil shrouds itself. This is about the rule of law. A society that puts itself under law has at least a chance of finding justice, security, peace; even, sometimes, prosperity and liberty. A society that does not, that is ruled by passion and charisma and whim and anger, is already lost. The contrast between Israel and Gaza could not be more stark. And that contrast is part of what drives the Palestinians mad. They know they are losers, they know they are poor and terrorized, and those who rule them know that they have beggared and terrorized them. The proof is right before them, as they look toward Israel and see what they, too, could have built, had they chosen differently.
oMan…
How about islam being deemed ‘Social Insanity’?
——–
When you’re stuck with a Neolithic ‘ethic’ — and believe its creed — it comes as a terrible puzzle as to why self-enslavement is not winning the future.
In many ways, islam is the big, l o n g con.
And who can believe that their entire society has been conned?
They live in a world of ‘Angel Martins’ — Stuart Margolis/ Rockford Files.
Naturally, they project their own vices onto others — particularly the Jews, in this case.
Weirdly, the Jews of Israel project reasonableness onto the Arabs. It didn’t work with the Nazis… when they were in collusion with Salafism… What’s different now?
A sensible strategy is to allow your opponent to overplay their hand.
The Arabs have fallen into the trap, everywhere.
Locally: In Australia, there is an increasing use by the media of the “Islamist” (even Muslim word) to explain why bad things happen in the world. This is a shift; up to now, they were “gunmen”.
In the US, I cannot generalise; but in Europe there is little doubt that the anti-islam movement is growing. Even the BEEB is being hammered (you’ve no doubt seen the interview of Sacerdoti on the BBC).
It’s at times like this I think that a, to coin a phrase, “leading from behind” tactic is great. Snare the idiots into overplaying their hand, and then starve them out. This is why I think Obama’s (stumbled upon?) strategy in the ME is correct – let the poor unfortunates meet their Inshallah by doing nothing. Give them a few bon mots such as “this great civilisation” or “nobody should have to live with Mohammed being insulted” (or something – so banal I can’t be bothered to look it up), the mugs believe him, ramp up the self sacrifice, only to be tragically blown up. Bit like the Democrats, really.
So it’s all going swimingly* in the ME, I think.
What about the US? Salad days here too. The fiscal cliff towers, the paper dollar mountain grows, the rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem. The trap’s been sprung, a reformed GOP will win the next election.
ADE
*Definition of swimmingly: deaths are minimised, and my side wins.
A dark hand is at work in Islam and throughout the world. The same dark hand that has been with mankind since the beginning. Lest we fall victim to patriotic hubris and pride, we should also recognize that the same force is working to get the upper hand in each of us.
Nevertheless, screw Hamas and militant Islam!
Walt’s hypothetical experiment has been tried in Germany in the 1930′s. Every person with at least a sixth grade education knows exactly what would happen if the situation was switched. The question I have is why do liberal/socialists in America insist on writing their silly opinions for public discourse that have no basis in reality. Why to they think that this time humans have learned from the past and won’t slaughter their enemies?
Your thought experiment shows the obvious: That the Palestinians under Hamas have no intention of ever acting in good faith, because to them acting in “good faith” means driving Israelis out of Israel. Which goes back to Golda Mier’s observation that peace will come only when Palestinians love their children more than they hate Israelis.
She also said “Don’t be humble, you’re not that great.”
Every time I see Walt’s name, I think of the class I had with him as an undergrad long ago. He truly thought it would be a good idea for a lot of nations to have nuclear weapons and that the balance would make the world a safer place. At least his idiocy is consistent across time
Walt doesn’t even understand Just War Theory (or more likely, he misuses it for his own ends). He, like all other leftists that I have ever heard or read, distorts the definition of proportionality in warfare.
Here is a good definition of proportionality taken from the Mt. Holyoke (no bastion of conservatism there) website:
The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
So in other words, I can use a precision-guided 500 lbs bomb to destroy a mortar site. I just cannot level a five-hectare village to destroy that same 100 m^2 mortar site. Proportionality does not mean that if someone shoots at me with an AK-47, I can only line up one rifleman with an AK-47 (can’t use an M-16, too accurate [sarcasm intended]) to fire back. I can use a squad supported by mortars as long as I follow the other laws of war.
Its very simple really. Its a mindset. In any conflict between third worlders and first worlders, the third worlders are always right. Its an article of faith. Its just like the desirability and need for single payer health care. It too is an article of faith. Once its framed in the appropriate terms all need for thinking or analysis ends, and for certain people it does.
It sure beats having to think, especially if you’re not very good at it.
1. Blast From the Past
“The Islamist chant is, “Khaybar, Khaybar o Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.”
Islam is exhibiting the symptems of someone entering the last phase of rabies; “progressing to acute pain, violent movements, uncontrolled excitement, depression”
This what the revelation of Muhammed has wrought; anti-life.
By contrast, here is a sample of the fruit of two millinium of the Juadaic-Christian heritage;
A Prayer in Darkness
THIS much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave,
Pity me not; but let the world be fed,
Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead,
Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave.
If I dare snarl between this sun and sod,
Whimper and clamour, give me grace to own,
In sun and rain and fruit in season shown,
The shining silence of the scorn of God.
Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,
If I must travail in a night of wrath,
Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,
Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.
Men say the sun was darkened: yet I had
Thought it beat brightly, even on—Calvary:
And He that hung upon the Torturing Tree
Heard all the crickets singing, and was glad.
G.K.Chesterton
Proportionality is an anti-Darwinian Maxist construct. Pure BS. The US government uses disproportionate force of will against the electorate by abrogating the rule of law in the form of Voter ID. The Left has two kinds of power. 1) Hard power by government fiat. 2) Soft power, by creating a victim classes that must be protected from historically European peoples.
“But the unfortunate fact is that the United Nations did not prevent or stop the Cambodian, Rwandan or Kosovar massacres.”
All they had to do was to edit Wikipedia.
#12
Yes, and that notion only seems to be trotted out when the “wrong” side is winning.
Well, gee in WWII the Proportionality Argument did not apply, it seems.
The much vaunted Luftwaffe did not have a heavy bomber force that would have enabled them to put on a decent airshow by U.S. standards. The Panzer legions were almost trivial compared to U.S. tank production and deployment. The Whermacht never did an amphibious assault landing under fire even as little as 1000 miles from home. The Kriegsmarine had but one aircraft carrier and it never sortied once for a combat mission. Little old Taffy 3 could have kicked the whole German Navy’s butts AFTER Kurita’s Force A had at them off Samar.
But the Germans were White Northern Europeans, so all was fair game.
I wish I had recorded the TV debate where a college student anti-war type stated, “It is immoral for whites to attack anyone whose skin color is darker than theirs.”
The residents of Gaza are “darker” than the Israelis. Of course, that’s just dirt.
The Arab-Israeli conflict defies any appropriate definition of “proportionality”.
Was it “proportional” when Israel was pelted with indiscriminate rocket fire against her civilian populations, every day… and responded with Operation Cast Lead, in which Palestinian non-combatant populations were warned ahead of time of incoming strikes? Was it “proportional” in Jenin, and elsewhere, in which the Palestinians booby-trapped entire neighborhoods, in callous disregard for the lives of their own people trapped within, and Israel sent in her own soldiers to clear the streets, with orders to spare life whenever possible (at the expense of Israeli lives)?
If we insisted on true proportionality, Israel would respond to the indiscriminate rocket attacks with her own indiscriminate rocket attacks. But that would result in far greater Palestinian loss of life than results from what Israel is actually doing. Is that really what Walt wants?
To understand the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the chances for peace, one need only observe the rhetoric of both sides, and notice that both sides live up to their rhetoric. The Arabs, Palestinians and others, have repeatedly declared their intention to push the Jews into the sea, and have tried many times to do so. Israel has never had such a goal; instead, Israel has always tried to find common ground for making peace, and have taken concrete steps for peace multiple times (e.g. voluntarily giving up the Sinai Peninsula in 1979 and Gaza in 2005).
One side says “we’ve had our differences, but let’s sit down and settle them and figure out a way to be peaceful neighbors”. The other side says “I have always wanted to kill you, and I want to kill you now, and any concession I wrench from you today will make it easier for me to kill you in the future”. How is negotiation between the two sides possible?
As Ariel Sharon pointed out years ago, the Palestinians have never been forced to lose. This is the way warfare traditionally ends — when one side says “I surrender, I’ll do anything you ask, so long as you stop hurting me”. Then the terms for peace are dictated by the winner. The Palestinians have never been forced to surrender or die; the Israelis have never been permitted to dictate terms to them. As such, the Palestinians have no incentive whatsoever to stop fighting.
Bibi Netanyahu answered Walt’s rhetorical question years before it was asked. Netanyahu said, “If the Palestinians laid down their weapons tomorrow, there would be no more fighting. If the Israelis laid down their weapons tomorrow, there would be no more Israel.” It doesn’t take a PhD to see that he was right.
Wretchard, this simply points out that the UN is a one side mechanism for lawless and inhumane Countries or Organizations to prohibit lawful countries from stopping their inhumane and lawless behavior! Just more evidence to leave the UN and boot the UN out of America!
I wonder if the Israelis are not taking care piecemeal of outstanding rocket threats in a leadup to an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. First Hamas, then Hezbollah, and finally Teheran.
Hamas just fired at Tel Aviv and towards Jerusalem. Air raid sirens. No injuries/damage.
The Israeli gov doesn’t bother with a few rockets and mortars in the south, but once the big cities get targeted, public opinion will force their hand.
IDF reserves called up.
Game on
Great interview here with the chief Rabbi of Tzfat (Safed)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/162164
“We do our task because we have no choice, but it’s important to know that we do not love war,” he explained. “We want peace. But now, when we need to fight against villains like those in the Gaza strip, it is a positive commandment to fight them.”
“During the battle itself one must fight bravely with no mercy for the cruel, because those who are merciful to the cruel are ultimately cruel to the merciful,” he added.
“May G-d watch over and protect and save and take mercy on all of his sons and daughters, on the people of Israel, on all the soldiers. May He give wisdom and knowledge to the commanders to make the right decisions, courage to our leaders to protect the people of Israel without fearing the nations of the world at all,” he said.
One last thought on proportionality: If the proximate cause of what is causing the nation injury is a poisonous ideology enshrined in your enemy’s charter, vigorously pursued by its leadership, and supported by a vocal and dedicated portion of (and possibly the majority of) the population, then would it not be proportional to attack those things? Wasn’t that our justification for pursuing unconditional surrender in WWII? We didn’t need to defeat a king or an army. We needed to defeat an ideology and convince entire peoples that they could no longer follow that ideology.
If the Israelis followed the same line of thinking that we used to justify flattening cities in WWII, then they would be entirely justified to fight a total war againt HAMAS.
This “Walt” guy is giving our Walt a bad name.
“What if powerful Palestinians were bombing weak Israelis?” Then the Israelis would understand how hard it would be to hold back.
This is so ivory tower idiotic. Go take a pencil and stick it in the face of a grizzly bear a few times. That’s what the Palestinians keep doing to the Israelis. Let’s be clear who is holding back on what. By rational standards the Palestinians should all be dead.
Accepting a “proportionality” argument immediately reduces you to your enemy’s level, you have already lost.
The US has never *really* accepted this, you know, or our troops in Afghanistan would have been nothing but criminals and mental defectives with no weapons larger than a jeep-mounted machine gun.
This has been Israel’s conundrum since 1948, they have been forced to some kind of “proportionality” by being a small country dependant on tenuous political and economic lifelines. Israel remains an art project, as nations go. They have done masterfully for two generations, perhaps they can continue, I don’t know. They should win some kind of all-history prize for their restraint. If indeed they do own multiple nuclear weapons, as I certainly hope they do, they should get the prize with double-clusters and retire it forever. And if events transpire that they fire off all those weapons tomorrow, an instant before Israel vanishes forever from a generation of Western emnity and Islamic pressure, it will be a sad, sad lesson for all time as well.
Israel should stand off Gaza and pound them with artillery when the missiles fly. Proportionality would suggest Israel use indiscriminate targeting. They should certainly start by dropping a 2,000 pound bomb on any launch site, whether it’s a civilian home or a hospital or a kindergarten, matters not in the least. That is, if the Palestinians don’t care, the Israelis cannot afford to. This mistaken restraint, over time, could lose Israel their existence.
Israel wins nothing by their excess virtue, they will always be pushed back further, by closet (?) anti-semites or just plain western PC fools. The Palestinians just fake injury and outrages, it’s a form of begging that goes back to long before Mohammed, and apparently it still works as well as it ever has, maybe better. Grow up, Israel. Before it’s too late.
The fundamental defect of Hamas from a human rights point of view is not that is weak, but that is evil.
Of course, the only defect that matters to the self-proclaimed human rights crowd is not being useful to them. Everything else is irrelevant.
Palestinians have been useful as some sort of miserables they can trot out to shame the first world with, but are they still? Israel I think, doesn’t care any longer. ADE’s points about Europe and Australia show the direction of things there – waving the bloody keffiyah is losing it’s power. In the US, meh. We got bigger problems and everybody knows it. Hell, squabbles about free birth control pills are more important than dead Arabs in the US these days. I think the Arab Street has outlived it’s usefullness to the Human Rights Community.
In fact, I’m sensing that the Human Rights Community may have outlived it’s usefullness to the broader evil of Progressivism.
“And please: The issue is … Israel['s] …unjustified and illegal occupation and the subjugation of millions of Palestinians, which is the taproot from which these events spring.”
It’s the ‘taproot’ that must be addressed. That is the ultimate justification for both Palestinian ‘resistance’ and those that support the Palestinian ’cause’.
Israel has repeatedly and currently retreated from the Palestinian territories and yet never have the Palestinians agreed that the ‘illegal occupation’ had been ended. That is because the heart of the issue is the existence of Israel itself.
And the heart of the contention that Israel does not have a right to exist is Islam’s theological tenets. As Islam’s tenets are, according to Muhammad, direct instructions from Allah, Islam is theologically incapable of reform. So Islam’s tenet that once territory is Islamic, it must remain so is not open to revision. As to revise the Qur’an is to ‘correct’ Allah’s very words and to do that is to implicitly state that Muhammad was either lying or deluded in claiming that the archangel Gabriel dictated the Qur’an to him. In either case, the theological foundation of Islam collapses.
Islamic theology insists that the very existence of Israel in ‘Palestine’ is an ‘illegal occupation’…the size of Israel doesn’t matter, it did not in 1948, 1967 or at any time. It’s a ‘religious’ imperative, an ‘inescapable duty’ for Muslims that Israel cease to exist. The differences are irreconcilable and permanent.
The status quo in the Islamic/Israel conflict will continue until the paradigm changes. That paradigm will not change until either Israel is destroyed or Israel accepts its reality and develops a strategy commensurate with that reality.
Such a strategy would make it a national priority to develop and secure from attack the natural gas fields recently discovered off Israel’s coast. It’s a national security matter because Obama will end aid as soon as politically possible. Israel needs income to maintain its military superiority.
Once that revenue is secured, Israel needs to announce a new doctrine of holding Islam itself responsible for attacks against it. Under that doctrine, retaliation for terrorist attacks will, in the future include retaliation against Islamic holy sites. Which will be held hostage to Muslim’s good behavior.
Israel needs to announce that any nuclear attack against it will result in the nuclear destruction of Mecca.
Israel needs to prepare to annex Gaza and expel every Palestinian from it.
Announcing that the same fate awaits the West Bank if it allows terrorist attacks to be conducted from its territory.
Israel should be prepared to expel every Israeli Muslim if attacks continue.
Israel needs to create a buffer zone around it that precludes conventional attack. Create an Israel that excludes Muslims to greatly reduce terrorist attacks. Consider leaving the U.N. and create a nuclear deterrent that places Islam itself in the cross hairs.
The world has made Israel, a country that only wants peace, into a pariah nation. It’s time it starts acting like one…until the world either ends Muslim immigration* and isolates this 7th century death cult or Wretchard’s Third Conjecture occurs, which will permanently end the problem.
* In a recent poll, 46 percent of American Muslims – said they believe those Americans who offer criticism or parodies of Islam should face criminal charges.
One in eight respondents said they think those Americans who criticize or parody Islam should face the death penalty, while another nine percent said they were ‘unsure’ on the question.
Four in 10 said Muslims in America should not be judged by U.S. law and the Constitution, but by Islamic Shariah law.
32 percent – believe Shariah should be the supreme law of the land in the United States.
70% disagree that U.S. citizens who are Christians have the right to evangelize Muslims to consider other faiths.
58 percent said criticism of their religion or of Muhammad should not be allowed under the Constitution.
Nearly one in three said Israel either has no right to exist or they were uncertain whether it does.
Mohamed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, pledges solidarity with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood cohort in Gaza. “I don’t want to take unusual steps,” Morsi added, “but if I see that the homeland is in danger, I won’t hesitate.”
Interesting that he calls Gaza the “homeland.”
Were not the Susan Valkyries at one time not so long ago calling for U.S. troops to invade Israel? How far is Obama willing to go to advance the interests of the MB? Egypt is certainly in no position by itself to take on Israel.
Mohamed Morsi joined the Muslim Brotherhood while getting his PhD at USC. Another multicultural triumph.
Bullshit, pure and simple.
If you attack me, I am not required to limit my defense to what YOU are capable of. That’s idiotic.
Right, we give a man 25 to life for rape. Would it not be proportional to just have him sexually assaulted by Barney Frank? An eye for an eye a buggery for a buggery. Isn’t this mere accordance with archaic law? Again lawfare? Isn’t disproportionality a tennant of modern civil society, a cornerstone of Mutually Asssured Destruction? And if these morals are not adhered to to some extent, then wouldn’t it promote eternal feuding between the aggreived and any edifice of state? Marxists are full of sh!t and should be shown the door with unspeakable disproportionality. They don’t beleive any of this crap anymore than they think we will call them on it. Liberal scolds all.
“70% disagree that U.S. citizens who are Christians have the right to evangelize Muslims to consider other faiths.”
Does the Do_Not_Call registry bother you?
So while I was out today listened to MSM reports and talking heads about the ‘brink of war’ between Israel and Gaza
/Hamas. If this is not war what is?
I suppose that only ground troops is war according to Reuters et all. That is planned and pending as we speak. The lack of reporting is because of strict military censorship from both sides. All depends on military success of IAF airstrikes. If that is not enough then we will see. Israel is politically aligned with broad support for military operation with the goal of stopping the rocket attacks. That means end not just couple a week is OK.
Don Rodrigo/22
Thank you. My sentiments exactly.
STAMPING OUT THE ANTS
Islam has been licking its wounds since Lepanto and the gates of Vienna, and now sees its opportunity in the perceived weakness of the West. But they are wrong. The West is not weak, it is only temporarily indecisive, temporarily indulgent. As an elephant will ignore the ants biting its ankle only for so long, the West will, when it can ignore the ankle bites no longer, without further thought stamp out the ants.
Lepanto, Vienna, the Muslim tide surged
And dashed itself upon the rock
Of the Cross and the Crowns until Muslims were purged
From the lands of those they sought to mock
They were driven back unto their bare tribal lands
Where they sat and lamented their lot
Sitting round their campfires in the soft shifting sands
Eating goat from the communal pot
For those of you who would like to do something to help Israel now, the Jewish Federations of North America has set up an Israel Terror Relief Fund to support the more than one million residents of the parts of Israel that are being attacked and to provide immediate aid to the most vulnerable Israelis during this time of conflict.
You can contribute by using this web address:
https://secure-fedweb.jewishfederations.org/page/contribute/help-israel-now
#29,
The key word is ‘consider’. I find proselytizing as bothersome as anyone. A proselytizer however has a perfect right to ask if I might be interested in whatever they’re selling. I have a perfect right to say I’m not interested. When said in a firm but polite manner, invariably Christian proselytizers respect that position.
Note also that Muslims think that they have a perfect right to convert.
It’s called hypocrisy.
On this issue of proportionality, its a matter of definition. In recent prisoner exchanges, the Israelis have exchanged a thousand Palestinians for return of a single live Israeli. That was deemed proportional then. Why not now when the issue is causing casualties?
Stephen Walt? [...short pause...] Stephen Walt?
File under: ROTFL