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.