-National Interest
"12 Signs It’s Time to Get Out of Gaza
1. Your enemy refuses to protect its people. Normally, if you invade a country and pound the daylights out of it, you can expect its government to seek, or at least accept, a cease-fire to stop the bleeding. Not here. Hamas has refused to endorse or honor a simple cease-fire despite the ridiculous imbalance of casualties.
Israel argues, correctly, that Hamas doesn’t care about Gazan civilians. Hamas also seems fragmented, unable to make decisions. Arab governments aren’t stepping in, either—they seem to hate Hamas more than they love Gazans. But the absence of competent advocacy for Gazans isn’t a reason to keep shooting. It’s a reason to stop. When your enemy shows no mercy for its own people, that responsibility falls to you.
9. Your eldest statesman says it’s time to stop. A week ago, Shimon Peres stepped down after seven years as Israel’s president. The job is ceremonial, but Peres has stratospheric prestige, having served as prime minister in three different decades. On Wednesday, he visited wounded Israeli soldiers and praised them for fighting Hamas terrorists “who have no respect for human lives.” But he also concluded that the war had “exhausted itself” and “now we have to find a way to stop it.” For this, Israel’s housing minister called Peres’ remarks “unacceptable” and accused him of undermining military morale.
10. Your army hints that it’s time to stop. On Tuesday, an anonymous “high-ranking military official” told Israeli reporters that “the political leadership must decide now—either we push deeper [into Gaza] or we backtrack.” He cautioned that “we won't be able to take out every tunnel” and added (in a country where polls overwhelmingly favor further prosecution of the war) that “our responsibility is to lead the offensive to where it needs to go, not to where the public wants.” That sounds like a warning that the wise course, at this point, is to get out.
12. The West Bank is boiling. So far, the war has been confined to Gaza. But Hamas has been doing everything possible to inflame anger in the West Bank. Over the last two weeks, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency has tracked an increase in “armed attacks on Israeli military sites and settlements in the West Bank.” If Israel doesn’t end one war soon, it may soon be facing two."
-Slate
208 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 208 of 208Sock puppets?
Icepick, aka Pat Buchanan
Deborah, aka Bay Buchanan
Dude, it's not a slur to note that Islamic theocrats are essentially anti-semitic (or anti-Jewish. Whatever). It's simply part of their theology… and it's a mainstream part of it. They believe the world is divided up into sections called "Dar al Islam" and "Dar al Harb" (the abode of war), and that the two will be in conflict until the former prevails. It's a political religion that asks for struggle ("jihad") for the cause of spreading Dar al Islam (or in the case of the entire British mandate of Palestine, keeping or regaining it), a regime under which other religions ("dhimmis") are either to be tolerated under acknowledgement of Muslim domination and with a tribute tax paid to those overlords indefinitely thereafter to boot, or killed.
You can deny that that's anti-Jewish and anti-Christian all you want, but that would be retarded. It would also betray the degree to which you impose all the Western liberalism that you take for granted onto parts of the world where Western liberalism has no application or history.
It might be cold hard neutrality that forces some realists to say, "fuck it", give the Islamists what they want. But don't think you're fooling anyone by saying that you care for that approach out of an appeal to being "even-handed" or "kind". You can see what even the least theocratic regimes are up against in repelling what they know to be a state of backwardness, and it's not pretty there either.
But inviting anti-Semites to the bargaining table without getting them to accept the defeat of their anti-Jewish priorities, first, is exactly that. You're an enabler.
My enumeration of these doctrines might sound harsh or bigoted, but it is simply a restatement of the same, very mainstream Islamic theology that usually goes unstated, but never ignored by those who can only act on their need to attain power by reminding themselves and their popular supporters of it.
Hamas is backed by Iran, whose intentions you might think we should asses more charitably. In that case, I introduce you to another term of art in Islamic theology, "taqiyya".
You simply do not understand the mindset you wish to bargain with.
The Jews, OTOH, simply want the same self-determination that all other nations are afforded.
Aligning those two, very different interests is damn near impossible - unless one is defeated utterly. So keep pretending that you can get them to bargain with each other in the meantime. It's an illusion.
Ritmo, please see the half grin on my face as I write this...
How can you be so clear and compelling here, on this subject, and so fucked up on much everything else, leastways to my mind.
No need to answer, there is likely no answer anyway.
Just that I happen to think one can't necessarily be so discerning. It's two paths, two choices, not a multitude of paths, with infinite choices, as then you end up with infinite ends. No fractals. We're not there yet as human beings.
With the motherfuckers we're facing it's death or... well, there is no other choice other than to lay down and accept your clictorectomy, as it pleases Allah.
I have probably misspelt clictorectomy. I don't care. The word shouldn't even be in our vocabulary.
Xray - I am with you - I have never agreed with anything that our Filthadelphia commenter has ever written, and I was shocked that he was on the moral side of this issue.
But even with that, he is still wrong about every other subject he has ever addressed in comments, here and elsewhere. No idea why he gets this right and the rest wrong, but even a blind hog occasionally finds an acorn, I reckon.
Why can't I be Pat Buchanan, you sexist prick?
Hey, not long ago I recall R & B taking LSL down several pegs. I rather liked that.
Good ol' Larry - what ever happened to him, anyway?
Oh well, XRay. I'll have you know that this current issue is even prompting me to re-evaluate how much friendlier a lens through which I would look at other, domestic conservative policies.
I basically think the big problem with Israel-Gaza/etc. is that the world (and the left) are performing a bit of terrorism welfare. They think rewarding genocidal religious maniacs is the way to go. At the same time, they hypocritically use the word "Nazis" to shame Israel and/or its supporters.
My thinking about Israel itself is partly an affectation for a jolly old tribe, mostly about the rights of peoples to govern themselves (as the Kurds, etc., should also have), and now primarily about my support for the more civilized party and state. If the Palestinians showed that they could build a more tolerant oasis of prosperity that would better protect their minority Jews and Christians, then maybe I'd see their point.
But they're not, and they don't, and refusing to understand the basis of their more rotten culture and the further rot it undergoes the more we enable it, is simply wrong.
Israel is put into hard positions, but I now see that the world won't complain if they pound Gaza as relentlessly as Syria pounds its rebels. Because "the world's" pretension to morality is a sham. What it wants, morally-inclined Israel supporters should learn, if reluctantly, is stability. That's why Egypt and even the Saudis are hoping for Israel to crush this anxiety-inducing cancer in "Palestine".
So I'm coming out of this with a deeper respect for not only stability (a conservative value) and the Western ties that bind Israel's values to our own (which I've had for a good while), but the problem with enabling freeloaders. Palestinians are essentially the world's welfare non-state, with all these free goodies given to them, which they don't appreciate, they ruin, and childishly resent everyone else for finding ways to gain those things on their own.
Kerry's stupidity at being taped by Israel and Russia is also convincing me that the left's approach to foreign policy has gone too far. I still think domestic policy should strive for a balance between incentivizing responsibility and improving access to opportunity and the overall gains of prosperity, but I'm more wary of enablers now. As well as people who forsake the value of stability - or the role that America and Western civ have played in building that in a free society.
I am starting to see, more clearly, the perils of Obama's disregard for Western civilization. On one hand, I'm glad there's been disengagement from Israel. Better for them to sort it out on their own and not feel guilt-tripped into the pressures of pursuing a false "peace". But on the other, a future president who gets that as well as Bush did might not be so bad either.
I could split the difference with whatever this successor does on the economy. As long as it continues growing and doesn't tank. But suffice it to say, I'm done enabling assholes and whiners. Let alone genocidal terrorists who feel they can gain sympathy by being a bunch of whining assholes. And I'm sure, as the right feels, there's more than enough of those in America to go around too. ;-)
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