Friday, July 28, 2006

 

Friday

Another dose of moral clarity from Charles Krauthammer:

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.




David Frum, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, elucidates Iran's Showdown With The West:
The war Hezbollah provoked is a war between Israel and Iran, with Hezbollah as Iran's proxy--and the people of Lebanon as Iran's victims. The Lebanese have been kidnapped by Iran as surely as those two Israeli soldiers abducted on the northern border.

Israel has recognized that tragic fact. It has fought this war on its northern border as humanely as it can. Flip the switch in Beirut and the lights come on; open the taps, and the water flows. Essential services have been spared. The runways at Beirut Airport have been bombed to stop reinforcements to Hezbollah, but the control towers and the newly built terminal have been spared because Lebanon will need them later.

Unintended civilian casualties have tragically occurred, as they do in any war. But Israel's sincere and costly attempts to minimize the loss of innocent life present a stark contrast with Hezbollah's deliberately atrocious war methods.

Hezbollah has boasted that it has tried to fire missiles into Haifa's chemical factories, in hope of releasing gases to poison the civilian population. Hezbollah rocket warheads arrive crammed with ball bearings, so as to inflict maximum death and suffering upon the civilian populations at which they are fired.

Nobody wants the war to last a minute longer than it needs to. But ironically, letting this war go to the finish would be a far more humane policy than the UN's call for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire.

And in his column at NRO, Frum quotes Canadian Major General Lewis McKenzie, who makes clear the truth about the Israeli bombing of the UN outpost that killed four UN observers along with a bunch of Hezbollah lowlifes. Terror apologists and other idiots might note that the problem has a familiar ring to it:
What he [Major Hess-von Kruedner] was telling us was Hezbollah fighters were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them, and that's a favorite trick by people who don't have representation in the U.N. They use the U.N. as shields knowing that they cannot be punished for it.

At least that's what Hezbollah was counting on when they overran the U.N. position. Hezbollah suddenly has a problem they didn't have before now; unlike the U.N., Israel is no longer willing to enable their cowardice. The deaths of the four UN observers are no more or less unfortunate than those of any other innocents in this conflict, but they are not unacceptable. In fact, they are a necessary part of facing down and crushing any part of the Islamofascist movement, because that's how they fight: from over the shoulders of innocents.


Illuminating Exchange Of The Week comes courtesy of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Bolton renomination hearing:
John Kerry: This has been going on for five years, Mr. Ambassador.
John Bolton: It's the nature of multilateral negotiations, Senator.
Kerry: Why not engage in a bilateral one and get the job done? That's what the Clinton administration did.
Bolton:
Very poorly, since the North Koreans violated the agreed framework almost from the time it was signed.

Is that the same John F'n Kerry who as the Democratic Presidential candidate criticized President Bush for going it alone in his foreign policy? Why yes, it is.
HT Power Line




Okay, now I understand, sort of: several Democrats, taking Howard Dean's lead, boycotted the speech by Iraqi PM Maliki to Congress after accusing him of anti-Semitism because he criticized Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Following that logic with integrity (there's that damned "i-word" again) would lead one to the concurring conclusion that to criticize President Bush for invading Iraq would be, uh, anti-American.

Fair enough, as long as Democrats don't question Maliki's patriotism. Or something like that.

I read that Democrats John Dingell, John Conyers, Nick Rahall, Pete Stark, and Neal Abercrombie voted against House Resolution 921, which formally condemns Hezbollah's attacks against Israel. Are they also anti-Semitic, Mr. Dean?




Dog Bites Man




Victor Davis Hanson describes The Vocabulary of Untruth, in which words take on new meanings as Israel struggles to survive.




The fun rages on at Seixon.

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