Too Predictable…

By Gerald A. Honigman

Another random bus bombing. This one happened a day before Israel was to be "brought to court" to defend itself for building a fence designed to keep Arabs from disemboweling its kids.

More recently, now on Mahmoud Abbas’ watch, a half dozen more Jews were slaughtered and others severely wounded for helping Arabs find a way to feed their families in Gaza.
More incinerated and maimed innocents, whose only crime was existence in a land where their ancestors have lived for over three thousand years. Another hollow condemnation by the alleged "good half" of the Arafatian / Hamas-Islamic Jihad good cop / bad cop team. Not that they really object, but it’s "bad publicity" for their cause.

Even with the Egyptian ghoul out of the picture, his legacy still works the strings.

I believe it was Martin Niemoller, a German theologian, who wrote something like the following:

In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me–and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Coincidentally, a bit further back on August 19, 2003, another Arab bought his ticket to "paradise" and its seventy or so virgins by blowing Jews apart on yet another bus, while a colleague was doing likewise to United Nations workers in Iraq.

Now, what was the lesson from Reverend Niemoller’s remarks again?

This is the same U.N. that, at best, has seen a "moral equivalence" between Jewish babes and grandmothers being deliberately and wantonly slaughtered, and Israeli steps taken to try to stop that slaughter. Some of the latest Arab suicide bombers claimed they did this to avenge Israel’s killing of armed Hamas fighters in Gaza.

What I am writing is now admittedly being written in anger, but there is no doubt regarding the truth of the words: Israel has become too darned predictable.

The Old Warrior himself has been caving in to constant pressure coming at him from all over, and especially from his so-called friends– the same ones who would have leveled the source of these repeated atrocities had it been done to their own peoples…or even to others. Among many examples, recent events in Fallujah come to mind.

Arabs, who refuse to dismantle their terrorist infrastructures and who still do not accept the permanency of a Jewish State, also demand that Israel stand by and do nothing while Jews get butchered. This is the "moderate" new Palestinian Arab leader’s position. They can’t seem to figure out why Israel must have such things as a security fence or real borders instead of armistice lines, which made it, among other things, a mere 9-miles wide– a constant temptation to those aiming to destroy it. As if the answer wasn’t obvious. How many other nations would continuously tolerate such horror without exacting just and devastating retribution? Think about the daisy cutter and bunker-buster bombs and such America used against our own enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, as just a few more recent examples.

Despite all that the Arabs say, they know that the Jews will try their best to just kill the rats in their dens. They’ll go house to house, endangering their own sons, and try to target the exact murderers and plotters as best as possible. That’s what’s been happening in Gaza and elsewhere, yet such operations become the Arabs’ excuse for the next atrocities.

The Geneva Conventions make perfectly clear that militants are not permitted to use their own non-combatants as human shields, that those non-combatants do not prevent an army from pursuing terrorists, and that any harm occurring to the civilian population as a consequence falls on the heads of the cowards using their own people this way. But you’d never know this by listening to the accounts in the press or given too often even by our own State Department.

Given all of the above, there is, again, only one conclusion: Israel has indeed become too predictable.

Arabs know that their own wives and children will not be deliberately targeted on buses, in restaurants, shopping centers, or wherever. So what I will state next, I regret, but will say anyway.

It’s time, given the Arab track record of barbarity, for them to reap what they have sown.

It’s time for massive Israeli retaliation. It’s time for Israel to do what is necessary to protect its citizens, regardless of how much aid the U.S. may decide to suspend. And many a U.S. citizen will convey the proper message to politicians if Foggy Bottom and other Arabists are allowed to have their way with Israel over this.

Poll after poll among Arabs have shown that even if Israel withdrew to the 9-mile wide armistice lines imposed upon it after the 1948 fighting (having been invaded by surrounding Arab countries immediately upon its rebirth)–something UN Resolution #242 expressly does not require it to do–Arabs would still reject its right to exist. So who’s kidding whom here regarding such things as the fence? And Israel’s "friends" know this as well.

It’s time for Arabs to know that Israel will tell the hypocrites around the rest of the world (much of which has also had plenty of Jewish blood on its hands) that it doesn’t care what they think and act to protect its own people–as any other nation would–as best as it can.

It’s time for Israel to not worry about being too precise in its targeting…for it’s time that Arabs fully understand that if they harbor and support terrorists as heroes, they’ll share in their fate. President George W. Bush said almost those exact words regarding America’s own fight not long ago.

When dealing with their own "problems"–a la Assad’s "Hama Solution" in Syria (in which ten times more people were killed in a month than Israel killed in two years of intifada), King Hussein’s Black September in Jordan, Saddam’s murder of Kurds in Iraq (5,000 in Halabja alone), the slaughter of millions of Black Africans in the Sudan, and so forth–Arabs have murdered literally millions by poison gas, bombs, and artillery from afar. All without a peep out of the United Nations. And no hearing before an international court of justice, either.

It’s time for Israel to make it clear that it will use its own air force, tanks, and such–the way America and others have–to target the rats’ dens instead of risking the lives of its own nineteen-year-old infantrymen by futilely trying to do the job as "morally correct" as possible. This has gained it nothing among the world’s hypocrites and cost it the lives of more of its own soldiers instead.

Israel is fighting a war it didn’t want. It repeatedly offered more than fair compromises to its enemies, certainly far more than Arabs have ever offered to any of their own national competitors. But nothing short of its own suicide will satisfy most Arabs.

Arabs don’t worry about "ethical choices" when disemboweling Jews. On the contrary, the more innocent the victim, the more preferred he is for shock value as a target. It’s time for Arabs to get massive doses of at least a modified version of their own medicine.

While I don’t advocate blowing up Arab buses, restaurants, schools, and such, any building, town, or whatever harboring murderers and their collaborators must be recognized for what the Geneva Conventions say it is: A fair military target.

Listen to Article #51/7:

"The presence of the civilian population shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attack…"

Article #58b:

The parties to the conflict shall…avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas."

The rats’ dens are typically set up in or adjacent to civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc., as America has learned for itself in Iraq.

Article #51/2:

The civilian population…shall not be the object of attack. Acts of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited…Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.

Arabs typically target Israeli civilians.

And those famous funeral processions showing hundreds of the dead butcher’s colleagues firing weapons into the air? It’s time that Israel sees them for what they are…one big, legitimate military target.

It’s time for Israel to stop letting Arabs dictate how the game will be played. If mothers and infants are fair game for Arabs, then what are the murderers’ collaborators for Israel? Keep in mind that Mahmoud Abbas himself was recently carried on the shoulders of the same folks who committed the latest atrocity…and promised them protection from Israeli retaliation to top it off.

It’s time for Israel to send the press packing, tell the UN to drop dead, build the security fence as quickly and as strongly as possible with an adequate buffer (permitted by U.N. #242)–so it doesn’t have its absurd suicidal 9-mile wide existence again–and ask its friends in the United States to stop having one set of standards for themselves and another one for Jews in their sole, microscopic state. When we thought we knew where Saddam was dining, we bombed the restaurant to smithereens, innocent diners present and all.

And the more unpredictable the Israeli response to Arab barbarity, the better.

I wish it had not come to this. I still wish that there will yet be another way. But if volumes of Arabs start dying relatively randomly (Arabs outnumber Jews 50 to one…they know this…so do the math), as Jews are doing, perhaps they’ll be less likely to treat their own terrorists as heroes. Thousands of them paraded through the streets as soon as they heard of their latest "victory."

While this may also not be the solution, Israel has tried everything else (including insanely offering up 97% of the disputed territories, half of Jerusalem, and the like) except consenting to its own demise, and nothing else worked either. Arabs simply replaced a pre-’67 "one fell swoop" strategy for Israel’s destruction with a destruction in stages strategy instead. Indeed, Abbas repeated this plan while he was campaigning.

It’s time for Israel to lose its predictability and for Arabs to get a mega-taste of what they’ve been dishing out. And it’s time for Israel to draw its own lines in the sand and let all know–including and especially its alleged friends–that justice demands that it accept no less.