Entries from July 2006 ↓

via the Sandmonkey

Enjoy!

Following up on the creepy news I posted yesterday about the billboards all over Tehran denouncing Israel, here’s the evidence: “Israel Must Be Wiped Out [sic] the World.” (Hat tip: Engage )

Original source: Jeff Weintraub, who has been doing great work on the Middle East conflict.

Read the lament of Orna Shimoni, the mother of a fallen soldier and one of the founders of the Israeli peace movement Four Mothers, which eventually spurred Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000:

“This is an existential war. A war over our actual lives. For a long time I have had this feeling: What will happen if one day the IDF comes down with a virus? Nothing serious, the flu. But even with the flu and a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius and no strength, you can’t do anything. So what will happen if the IDF gets the flu? If all our soldiers have a temperature of 40 degrees.

“Today I know what will happen: there will be a slaughter here. We will not be in the sea, because we will simply be slaughtered. Not one person from the nation of Israel will remain. If the IDF comes down with a virus, no one will defend us, including our friends in the United States. So I feel that despite the terrible pain, this war is just and necessary to protect our lives. And I think that even when we remove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Lebanon, that is not only right, it is also moral. Because I do not want them to be killed in our shelling. But we have to shell. And we have to fight. Because this time, it’s not over the security zone [in southern Lebanon], this time it is over our lives.

“That’s why it makes me so angry to see the extreme left now demonstrating and breaking the consensus. Because the left is me. Shulamit Aloni is me. And the extreme left says that even now, even after we withdrew to the last centimeter in Lebanon and even after we withdrew to the last centimeter in Gaza, we are to blame. And to say something like that, is to say that we are to blame because we live here and not in Uganda. And then the extreme left is actually saying that we are to blame until we are in the sea. Because they will not accept us in Uganda, you know. Or in the United States, or in France. So the extreme left is now giving me a certain feeling of hatred. Because then, too, no one cared what happened to the Jews. No one prevented slaughter. And today I’m undergoing an experience of slaughter. More than ever before, I know that if the IDF comes down with a virus, the next day the State of Israel will not exist.”

Read the whole thing.

I’m getting ready to go out of town. I’ll be mostly unplugged. Back soon.

In the comments, Stephanie says that David Mamet’s essay “If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem,” which I linked to the other day, is an exceptional essay. Indeed it is. And she’s right that I didn’t post enough of it. So here’s what I should have posted, especially in light of the events in Lebanon (emphasis added):

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don’t like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in “Exodus.” These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at “Sophie’s Choice,” sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world.

Read the whole thing.

Now, ask yourself: what is Hezbollah doing by hiding among civilians, by hiding under the umbrella of UN peacekeepers, by blocking civilians’ routes of escape, and by blocking the humanitarian aid to civilians (all of these facts have been mentioned in the MSM—no time to link)?

It is inviting attacks on the innocent, who are being forced to die as a form of entertainment (the continuous loop of “massacre” coverage) on Al Jazeera and Al Manar and LBC and CNN and MSNBC and BBC, etc.

The media, intentionally or not, is the handmaiden of terrorists. We—as a nation—need to get wise to this. Now.

In a story about the Israeli bombing of Qana, Lebanon, in which dozens of civilians were killed and buried under rubble—as were, presumably, the cowardly Hezbollah war criminals, rocket launchers, and other military hardware that were terrorizing Israeli civilians and thus being targeted for destruction***–-the International Herald Tribune inadvertently gives away its thinking on the issue of proportionality [emphasis added].

Lebanese civilians have suffered the most from the fighting, which broke out after Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid July 12 and killed eight others.

Is suffering based on body count, as the IHT implies? An Israeli blogger seems to think so too.

Israel says it is killing civilians by accident, but the disparity in firepower means the Lebanese still suffer much more.

I disagree. Is it only death that brings suffering? What about the terror of the entire civilian population of Israel, which has been targeted indiscriminately for 19 days? When will that terror end? Never.

Israel, unable to wipe out Hezbollah through methods approved by the Western world (that is, without killing—or “targeting,” as the vile MSM would have it—innocents) and unwilling to pay the price that the elites of the West want it to pay (send lots of ground troops into southern Lebanon to be turned into hamburger by Hezbollah butchers), is now doomed to live in terror forever. That is the calculus of this war.

The lesson here is not that Israel has lost—although that’s the line I’m hearing and reading at this moment. The lesson is that terrorists cannot be defeated by conventional military means.

Nevertheless, they must be defeated. And they will be. It will come at a cost that is higher than we can bear. There will be wholesale slaughter—maybe not in Lebanon but in Syria or Iran or Israel. It will be televised, instantly and in Technicolor. That is the price of appeasing Hezbollah—and of appeasing the opinion of Western elites—now. It will get much worse. And not just for Israel but for us all. That is war in the 21st century.

———–

***UPDATE: Israel has just called the attack on Qana “a mistake.”

This is creepy. It follows a report I linked to the other day which indicated that Iran’s Jews are under strong pressure from the regime. Now, an Ottowa man who has been in Tehran, says there is a hate campaign against Israel in the streets of the city:

“There are posters at intersections of (Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah) saying Israel must be erased from the map.”

Opponents of the Iranian government in Canada say they have received similar reports describing huge posters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Hezbollah leader alongside the slogan: “This war is our war.”

Earlier this week, Ahmadinejad said that Israel had “pushed the button of its own destruction.”

Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded by asking the world to listen to the Iranian president’s words.

“President Ahmadinejad is a very dangerous and very destabilizing force in this world. He is a person who denies the Holocaust while very diligently preparing the next one,” Mr. Gillerman told reporters in New York.

It was noted in the comments over at the Belmont Club the other day that during Bush and Blair’s press conference yesterday, Bush got very hot in response to a question about Iran. Here’s that portion of the transcript:

QUESTION: Mr. President and Prime Minister Blair, can I ask you both tonight what your messages are for the governments of Iran and Syria, given that you say that this is the crisis of the 21st century?

BUSH: Want me to start?

Our message is: Give up your nuclear weapon and your nuclear weapon ambitions. That’s my message to Syria — I mean, to Iran.

And my message to Syria is: You know, become an active participant in the neighborhood for peace.

Ignore the fact that he stumbled over his words. Concentrate on what he said (my emphasis). And Blair backed him up.

BLAIR: Yes, I mean, the message is very, very simple to them. It is that you have a choice. Iran and Syria have a choice. And they may think that they can avoid this choice; in fact, they can’t.

And when things are set in train, like what has happened in Lebanon over the past few weeks, it only — in my view — underscores the fact that they have this choice.

They can either come in and participate as proper and responsible members of the international community, or they will face the risk of increasing confrontation.

I was going to post a smart-ass item about the Farceur-in-Chief preferring Farsi, but it no longer seems quite so funny that he is excising foreign words from the language.

Mel Gibson was arrested for DUI, according to CNN.

But this celebrity-gossip site, which, as I understand it, stalks celebrities wherever they go (figuring that if they’re out in public, they’re fair game [a big blech to that]), has much more inflammatory things to say. [Note: this is gossip.
But I'm passing it on anyway.]

TMZ has learned that Mel Gibson went on a rampage when he was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving, hurling religious epithets. TMZ has also learned that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department had the initial report doctored to keep the real story under wraps. …

Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.”

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?” [emphasis added]

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan, who seems to have a hate on for the same celebrities as me.)

The juiciest gossip, of course, is the kind you believe…because it so obviously could be true. Like TMZ’s claim that Gibson is a raving anti-Semite. Frank Rich had a lot to say about that in 2004:

In an interview in the current Reader’s Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson: “The Holocaust happened, right?” After saying that some of his best friends “have numbers on their arms,” he responds: “Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps.” Yes, mistakes happened, atrocities happened, war happened, some of the victims were Jews. This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers, from David Irving to Mr. Gibson’s own father, Hutton Gibson, a prominent anti-Semitic author and activist. Their rhetorical strategy is to diminish Hitler’s extermination of Jews by folding those deaths into the war’s overall casualty figures, as if the Holocaust were an idle byproduct of battle instead of a Third Reich master plan for genocide.