Had someone done something when Hez killed 220+ marines in Lebenon things might be a lot diff today in Iran/Syria ect
Had we finished job in Somolia-genocide might not be continueing today--had we used more forceful means then throwing North Korea money to develop nukes--pic might be different there.
If we learned one thing from 911--it's complacency (spl) is an invitation to disaster.
Read article below--and don't forget any giving in or complacency does not apply exclusively to Israel as sign of weakness.
Michael Gove
THERE is a tragic pathos to the pictures we see every night from the Middle East, which wrenches the heart. It is impossible to witness the suffering of Lebanese and Israeli civilians without yearning, hoping and, even for those of us with tenuous faiths, praying that peace will come soon and the slaughter will cease.
But television images only tell part of the story. The drama being played out in south Lebanon is only one front in a broader conflict. And to understand why Israel is at war, in a confrontation it did not seek, we must look beyond the headlines. Our eyes may be clouded with tears over the suffering of innocents, but we must retain a sense of moral clarity in analysing why this fight continues.
Anyone wishing to find out more about the root causes of this conflict should visit a website called Harry?s Place run by a collective of impeccably left-wing, generally secular, robustly liberal political activists. Scroll down to postings from July 22 and July 13 and look at the pictures of Hezbollah rallies. I expect you will be, as I was, disturbed, to see serried ranks of men in military uniform giving stiff-armed fascist salutes. The similarity to Nazi rallies is more than accidental. Hezbollah?s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said of the Jewish people: ?If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.?
At the heart of Hezbollah?s ideology is a dark and furious hatred of the Jewish people, a pathology shared by the organisation?s sponsors in Damascus and Tehran. Syrian defence minister Mustafa Tlass has published a version of the notorious anti-semitic forgery The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, as part of his regime?s campaign of fomenting anti-Jewish feeling. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently sponsored a conference entitled A World Without Zionism, which is, of course, a world without Israel.
It is impossible to understand why Israel is at war, and why almost the entire spectrum of Israeli opinion, from the anti-occupation peace-lobby left through to the traditional right, supports the need to fight, without appreciating just who is targeting Israel, and why. The Jewish state is in the frontline of the global conflict against a new totalitarianism. Hezbollah and Hamas, supported by Syria and Iran, are organisations which exist to uphold a twisted version of Islam, which seek to purge what they see as Islamic lands of toxic Western influences such as feminism, liberalism and capitalism and which are targeting Israel because they see it as the vessel for those values.
The nature of the Islamist terror campaign can only be understood by grappling with the totalitarian ideology which drives jihadist warriors. While they proclaim themselves soldiers for Islam they are not representative of majority Muslim opinion. Islamists are a self-conscious vanguard who look down on other Muslims as sunk in barbarity or error. Islamism is not Islam in arms, it is a political creed which perverts Islam, just as fascism degraded nationalism and communism betrayed socialism.
Understanding why Israel is under attack does not mean supporting everything Israel does in its own defence. There are legitimate questions to be asked about Israeli strategy and criticisms can be made of Israeli tactics. But unless we appreciate the nature of the threat Israel faces, these questions and criticisms risk putting us in the position of judging a democracy under attack more harshly than the totalitarian forces arrayed against it.
That is why the furore over arms for Israel being routed through Prestwick needs to be put in context. If we accept that Israel has a right to defend itself against forces that will that state?s destruction, lobbing hundreds of missiles every night into civilian areas, then we should accept that it can acquire the means to defend itself from one of our allies. If we deny Israel the right to defend itself, then we risk putting ourselves in the same position as we were in during the early 1990s when we placed an arms embargo on Bosnia, then under attack from Slobodan Milosevic. We become potential accomplices in a totalitarian assault on a democracy.
It is important to remember that the Israeli Defence Forces are specifically told to act in such a way as to minimise civilian casualties, with airmen regularly aborting missions if the risk to non-combatants is too great. In contrast, Hezbollah target civilian areas and, even more ruthlessly, position their fighters and military infrastructure within civilian buildings, using Lebanese civilians as human shields for their attacks.
It is particularly tragic that the current conflict is raging in Lebanon, a country which was moving towards greater democracy after years of Syrian occupation and which enjoyed an increasingly lively and open civil society. But Lebanon?s progress was always going to be made more difficult by Hezbollah?s presence. An armed military organisation which refused to accept any laws but its own, and which operated a state within a state, Hezbollah would never have allowed the growth of a proper, pluralist, democratic system in Lebanon to threaten its terrorist operations. Whatever Lebanon?s future may be, it could never have achieved the peace and prosperity its people deserve with Hezbollah rampant.
Hezbollah has tried to legitimise its struggle by appropriating the sufferings of the Palestinians to justify its campaign against Israel. And the Palestinians? plight certainly demands urgent action.
But the leaders of terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Islamic states such as Syria and Iran are not sincere supporters of a free and democratic Palestine. They have consistently exploited the Palestinians? suffering, as a way to demonise Israel, and create a force to drive Israelis back into the sea.
If it were true that solidarity with the Palestinians were the primary political force motivating feeling among Arab political elites and Islamist movements, we would have seen investment pour into building up schools, hospitals and democratic structures in the Palestinian territories. However, while money has flowed from other Arab, and indeed Islamic states, into the Palestinian territories over the years, it has not been intended to help build a state, but to destroy one.
The reason why Israel is hated by the rulers of so many Arab states, by the leaders of so many terrorist organisations and, especially, by the world?s Islamists is not because of any specific crime against the Palestinians. In their eyes, Israel?s greatest crime is simply to exist . Israel?s existence as an openly plural, explicitly Western, conspicuously successful, democracy in the heart of the Islamic world is just too much to bear. And the Islamists of Hezbollah and Tehran believe they are winning the battle against Israel.
IN the past 10 years or so, as Islamists see it, Israel has been in retreat while their cause has advanced. When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 this was not viewed as the necessary preliminary to a stable re-ordering of the region in which Israel?s rights were to be respected as its neighbours? grievances were addressed. Islamists instead saw it as evidence of military and political exhaustion, a retreat forced on Israel by their terrorist brethren in Hezbollah and its confederates.
By the same token, Ariel Sharon?s withdrawal from Gaza was not seen as a redrawing of Israel?s commitments as a prelude to the establishment of a new Palestinian state living in deserved peace alongside a secure Jewish nation. Instead it was viewed as a vindication of Hamas?s terrorist campaign, a victory for Islamist arms which compelled Israel to retreat in disgrace and disarray. Indeed, the ability of Islamists to present Israel?s withdrawal as proof of Hamas?s success was a contributory factor towards the Hamas triumph in the elections which followed. Evidence of weakness in the face of Islamist action only succeeded in further strengthening the extremists? position.
We must all hope that there will be a peaceful resolution to the current conflict soon, but we must be aware that any settlement which confirms an impression of Israeli weakness will only succeed in emboldening the Islamists and their allies to escalate the conflict again, at another time, and in another way, of their choosing.
