Israel's grim situation

Today the existence of Israel is in greater peril than at any time since its founding hour when the fledging state was invaded by every one of its Arab neighbors. Only an understanding of this mortal threat to the Jewish state allows comprehension of the high stakes involved in Israel’s determined assault on Hamas in Gaza. First, consider that Israel is the same size as Massachusetts; its population is little greater than Colorado. Israel’s enemies have fifty times the territory, and twenty-five times the population. While lately only the President of Iran has publicly endorsed the goal of wiping Israel off the map, anyone familiar with the underlying mindset of Israel’s Muslim neighbors knows they all would welcome such an event.

Israel has been sustained through sixty years, three invasions, and the unremitting hostility of its neighbors only by its decisive military superiority and the support of the Western democracies.

Today with the exception of the United States support for Israel in the Western democracies has collapsed. Elite (i.e. leftist) European opinion tends to be pro-Palestinian, and borderline anti-Semitic. Most assuredly no European country would aid Israel militarily in the event of war. This general antipathy to Israel was well illustrated by the French ambassador to Great Britain who in an unguarded moment referred to the Jewish state as a “sh---- little country”.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate homelands for the Arabs and Jews thus setting the stage for the birth of Israel six months later. It is at once ironic and tragic that if the United Nations took such a vote today Israel would have no chance whatsoever.

Most ominous of all, however, is Israel’s steadily declining military edge over its enemies.

The Hamas rockets that have terrorized the population of southern Israel are harbingers of more horrific things to come. It is only a matter of time and political calculation before Iran provides its proxies in Gaza (Hamas) and Lebanon (Hezbollah) with the more sophisticated rockets that can reach all of Israel’s major population centers.

Israel is painfully aware of where events are leading, and in no doubt as to the implications of Iran’s not too distant acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Israel’s sense of looming apocalypse is confirmed by their recently revealed request to the U.S. to overfly Iraqi airspace for the purpose of conducting air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. A politically weakened Bush administration predictably refused this request thereby denying Israel the chance to replicate their years ago success in pre-emptively destroying Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons project.

Israel’s own government is arguably the weakest in its history. Not since the untimely death of Ariel Sharon has Israel had either a strong leader or a truly effective majority in the multi-party Knesset. The current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who leaves office in just a few weeks under a cloud of scandal and threatened prosecution authorized an earlier woefully mismanaged military incursion into Lebanon and the withdrawal from Gaza- now seen clearly as the strategic blunder which led to the present conflict.

For so long has America’s image of Israel been of outstanding leaders- David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir- and invincible soldiers- Moshe Dyan, Ariel Sharon- that today it is nearly impossible for us to grasp either the enfeebled condition of its democracy, or its vulnerability to military catastrophe.

President Bush steadfastly supported Israel and refused to buy into the pernicious doctrine of “moral equivalence” between Jews and Palestinians. Yet in Europe tens of thousands of demonstrators thronged the streets of London, Paris, and Berlin denouncing Israel as the equivalent of Nazi Germany. In New York similar rhetoric rings out in the United Nations.

To understand the desperate determination of Israel to stop rockets raining down on its citizenry we must see the plight of a small country denounced as a savage aggressor by most of “World Opinion”, its diplomatic isolation nearly complete, and its military advantages rapidly disappearing against an enemy whose goal is not peace but annihilation.

In 1945 as the victorious Allied armies drew back the curtain on the horrors of the Holocaust, the world’s revulsion and guilt- “If only we had known …… in time”- led to the creation of Israel.

Today we should recall the philosopher Santayana who warned that “those who do not heed the past are doomed to repeat it”.

William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News.

Obama's first 48: Do you feel safer yet?

Barack Obama has been president for all of 48 hours, and I already feel less safe. In one of his first official acts as president, Obama ordered the detention facility at Guantanamo closed "within a year", and officially outlawed any "enhanced interrogation" techniques that fall outside of the U.S. Army Field Manual. In a signing ceremony attended by all the usual liberal suspects, the new president said that we would confront global violence without sacrificing "our values or our ideals".  After years of criticizing the Bush Administration, Obama and the Democrats will now have a chance to do it "their way". Democrats, of course, have always put a premium on high minded ideals -- preferring things to look good, sound good and feel good -- even if they don't work well (or at all) in practice.   The notion of fighting a war against a brutal enemy -- that decapitates its prisoners and seeks to wipe us from the face of the earth -- with the high ideals of our democratic laws and rules is both naive and dangerous. It reflects the fact that most on the left have never seen the fight against Islamic extremism as a real war, but rather as a difficult issue that can be dealt with through diplomacy, so-called "soft power" and conventional law enforcement techniques. In this upside down view of the world, Miranda rights, Habeus corpus and all other protections for terrorist detainees makes perfect sense.

The immediate result of closing Guantanamo is that it will now fall on the U.S. justice system to figure out what to do with the 250 detainees that remain there. For many on the left, this presents something of an academic question; there is a common narrative among opponents of Guantanamo that those imprisoned there are mostly innocent sheep herders and others caught up in the net of American power, and thus unjustly held without trial. Nothing could be further than the truth: the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo are hardened killers who if released will take up terrorism against us again, and present a real and pressing threat to the United States.

Obama's move to close Guantanamo comes as no surprise, of course, having been a central theme of his campaign. In fact, Obama has been on record as favoring a conventional legal remedy for terrorists ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year in Boumediene v Bush that Guantanamo terrorists should be granted access to the U.S. courts:

“I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday”.

Now, as president, Obama is acting to put his view of "terrorist rights" into effect.  In ruling that interrogation techniques be limited to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which limits questioning to "please" and "thank you" kind of questions, Obama has effectively tied the hands of CIA and other interrogators who seek vital intelligence about Al Qaeda and other terrorists in the field. Unlike the salons of Paris, London or now Washington, D.C., the CIA and U.S. military operate in the real world, where innocent lives may depend on extracting information from evil doers intent on destroying us.

But that apparently doesn't matter to Obama, who with a swipe of his pen, has decided that he and the other liberals now in charge of our national security apparatus know more about security than does the current head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, who has testified repeatedly in front of Congress that enhanced interrogation techniques are critically important to our security. Rather than study the issue from the inside and take some time to make the right decision on this important issue, Obama has placed politics over public safety in unilaterally disarming our intelligence officials as a grand act of political theater.

The left believes that some quid pro quo will exist between us and our enemies; that somehow us living up to our ideals will make a difference with those who seek our destruction and are willing to go to any lengths to ensure it. It is hard to believe that smart people can be so naive as to the real nature of the threats arrayed against us.

I've said many times that the left lives in a fantasy world of their own making, and this is further proof that with the Democrats in charge we will be in greater danger because of it.

Jihadists' goal: 'Destroy US from within'

Documents uncovered in a raid on the Holy Land Foundation, subject of the recent terrorism trial in Texas, reveal the intention and strategy of Islamizing the United States, even if it takes a hundred years. Linked below is an electronic copy of the Muslim Brotherhood's "Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, 5/22/1991," shown in the original Arabic with English Translation. Consider, for example, Item 4 on the page numbered as Page 7 of 18 (but designated page 21 in the Adobe Reader for this PDF). Muslims are to understand that

their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes...

This candid self-indictment by the jihadists is worth sharing with those who think that Muslims are like any other group of immigrants and will assimilate, or with that a Mosque is no different than any other church, just like the Methodists on the next block.

Link to PDF: Muslim Brotherhood Intentions 1991

A Coloradan writes from Israel

We live in Gush Etzion, directly east of "Hamastan," about an hour away. We go to the beach in Ashkelon or Ashdod, just north of Gaza. It is somewhat safer here, in that there is only an occasional drive by shooting, random bombing, some rogue worker using his heavy equipment to plow down people and cars. Just before we got here a worker from Bet Lechem (Bethlehem), tried to blow himself up in our local grocery store. His trigger failed, and he was shot on the spot by a person who recognized him, realized Palestinian are not in Ephrata on the day before Shabbos (an obviously busy shopping day), and wearing an overcoat in the Summer. For the most part, we take all of this as ‘part of the territory’, but we don’t experience it on a daily basis, like our countrymen in Sderot.

They are heroes to us for staying in a town in which one gets 15 seconds warning to get to a bomb shelter. The kids and many adults are suffering from PTSD, night terrors, and other nervous conditions for their persistence. Shattered bodies are not the only casualties. We have known about this for years, and felt deeply betrayed that the same government who kicked out 9500 Israelis from Gush Katif by force, did not follow up on their promise that they would retaliate severely, if the Gazans used their newly self-occupied land as a staging area against Israel.

They finally are doing so, but each day is a nail biter because many of us have become cynical. This government is on its way out, so it is no coincidence that they are doing this just before an election. It has almost universal approval here. If you see something else on CNN, well, that’s the media for you. There is always a small but convenient group of ‘antis’ to keep things ‘even’. The general belief is that if Hamas stops the missiles (translate- we destroy their capacity to shoot them), we would be willing to stop short of destroying them. A power void could be worse, and Fatah has shown no less restraint. They are just being more closely watched; a condition which would be severely altered, if they got the state they clamor for.

Where we live is not in range of rockets either from Hamas or Hezbollah, but we have hosted friends besieged by both. In the last Lebanon fiasco, we had friends from the North living with us for six weeks. This past week, we hosted a family who left their home in Beersheva, due to the Grad missiles coming from Hamastan.

Since the incursion is becoming more successful, the amount of rockets is decreasing from a high of over 100/day to 14 yesterday (Jan. 5). May that trend continue to 0 and stay there, B”H. There are people who would see Hamas and Fatah totally destroyed, and the rest of the ‘civilian’ population gone, but mostly they admit that stance to be largely the result of unremitting aggression since we aspired to come here (this is not a political discussion, though).

I think the PR this time around has been astoundingly good. I was listening to a number of the news stations (France 24, CNN, Fox, Al-Jazeera, and the like), and encountered a new breed of well-informed, tough Israeli apologists. They did not allow themselves to be bullied, and did not allow the opposition to stray from the point. They diffused the so-called “humanitarian issue” by rightly pointing out how cynical it is to blame civilian casualties on Israelis, when Hamas routinely stores their military arsenals in schools, mosques, and other civilian structures. The thugs regularly hide among the civilians.

I am amazed at Israeli precision by having a Hamas/civilian casualty ration of 3-4/1. I particularly note an interview on Al-Jazeera, an understandably harsh forum for an Israeli. They brought on the A-Team. The interviewer constantly tried to overtalk the Israeli with the usual agenda. The Israeli would not allow it, and shouted over him (now this is the Israeli I have come to know and love). When the interviewer finally stopped his diatribe, the Israeli said that he was ‘invited’ on the air to give the Israeli side, so please be quiet for a few seconds, so he could present it. He them acquitted himself quite well.

No one is staying diplomatically quiet when the other side makes outrageous statements. Each detractor is being made to eat his words. I saw one Hamas apologist reduced to the eloquent response of saying, in an appropriately shocked voice, “I can’t believe you are saying this”, lacking any words of rebuttal. I’m sure it appealed to the more emotional among us.

Despite all this, it is not uncommon to find a victim of a terrorist attack and the attacker in the same Israeli emergency room. And there is a ton of humanitarian supplies sent to Gaza daily. Israel teats it enemies better that they treat themselves. ---------------------------------- Sol Grazi is a former Denver resident now living with his family in Israel.

Confronting the Hamas death cult

Six-year-olds in Gaza yearning to be suicide bombers? This and other horrors were confronted at the Rally for Israel which took place at the Hebrew Educational Alliance in Denver last night, January 5. There were between 400 and 500 people in attendance. The Deputy Counsel of Israel flew in from Los Angeles to address the audience. He asked some very good questions of Hamas, such as: * Why did they destroy the green houses turned over to them in August 2005? The Israelis had made millions exporting vegetables to the EU! It would have meant jobs and income for the Palestinians. Yet within one week, the greenhouses were trashed!

* When education is so vital to building a modern economy, why do their schools concentrate on memorizing medieval Islamic texts and teaching their toddlers that Jews are "apes and pigs"? If this is Islamic "education", is it any wonder that most Islamic countries are economic basket cases?

* Why is it that when you ask any 6 year old in Gaza what he wants to be when he grows up it's to be a "Shaeen" (a successful suicide bomber )?

* Why are the Palestinian people living in squalor and raw sewage, scavaging in garbage dumps for food, yet their leadership either steals the international aid funds or uses them to purchase military hardware? (Predictably, the liberal press shows such conditions and blames it on the Israelis!)

Interesting point: one of the demonstrators was carrying a sign that read "Those that live by the sword shall die by the sword". The demonstrator wasignorant of the fact that this is from the New Testament, not from HebrewScripture! And this from a sign carried in front of the Hebrew Educational Alliance!

Other signs decried "Stop the Massacre" ignoring the fact there is none, and ignoring the 6,000 rockets indiscriminately lobbed into Israeli communities nearby over the last 3 years. The demonstrator's sign applies aptly to Hamas.

If the "Progressives" are REALLY concerned for the welfare of the Palestinian people, they should be thinking about installing a government who cares about their welfare instead of one that focuses on medieval Jihad and the Destruction of Israel. The world needs to start educating Palestinian children for the 21st Century, not the 7th.

PS - See my videos from the Rally on www.youtube.com/deltamike67