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Too Predictable...
By Gerald A. Honigman
August 22, 2003
Another random bus bombing. More incinerated and maimed innocents whose only crime was their existence in a land where their ancestors have lived for over three thousand years. Another hollow condemnation by the alleged "good half" of the Arafatian / Hamas-Islamic Jihad good cop / bad cop team.
I believe it was Reverend Martin Niemoller, a German theologian, who wrote something like the following: "They came first for the Communists... but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews... but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Unionists... but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Unionist. Then they came for the Catholics... but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me... and by that time... there was no-one left to speak up for me."
On the same day, August 19, 2003, that some Arab bought his ticket to "paradise" and its seventy or so virgins awaiting him by blowing Jews apart on a bus, another was doing likewise to United Nations workers in Iraq. Now, what was the lesson regarding that Protestant clergyman's remarks again? This is the same U.N. that, at best, has seen a "moral equivalence" between Jewish babes and grandmothers being deliberately and wantonly slaughtered and Israeli steps taken to try to stop that slaughter.
I will write now, admittedly, in anger, but there is no doubt regarding the truth of the words: Israel has become too darned predictable.
Arabs, who refuse to dismantle their terrorists and who still do not accept the permanency of a Jewish State, also demand that Israel stand by and do nothing while Jews get butchered. They can't seem to figure out why Israel must have such things as a security fence or real borders instead of armistice lines which made it, among other things, a mere 9-miles wide...a constant temptation to those aiming to destroy it. As if the answer wasn't obvious. How many other nations would continuously tolerate such atrocities without exacting just and devastating retribution? Think about the daisy cutter and bunker buster bombs, etc. we used against our own enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq as just a few recent examples.
Despite all that the Arabs say, they know that the Jews will try their best to just kill the rats in their dens. They'll go house to house, endangering their own sons, and try to target the exact murderers and plotters as best as possible. Yet the Geneva Conventions make perfectly clear that militants are not permitted to use their own non-combatants as human shields, that those non-combatants do not prevent an army from pursuing terrorists, and that any harm occurring to the civilian population as a consequence falls on the heads of the cowards using their own people this way. But you'd never know this by listening to the accounts in the press or given even by our own State Department from time to time. Given all of the above, there is, again, only one conclusion...Israel has indeed become too predictable.
Arabs know that their own wives and children will not be deliberately targeted on buses, in restaurants, shopping centers, etc. So what I will state next, I regret, but will say anyway.
It's time, given the Arab track record of barbarity, for them to reap what they have sown. It's time for massive Israeli retaliation. Poll after poll among Arabs have shown that even if Israel withdrew to the 9-mile wide armistice lines imposed upon it after the 1948 fighting (having been invaded by surrounding Arab countries immediately upon its rebirth)--something UN Resolution #242 expressly does not require it to do--Arabs would still reject its right to exist.
It's time for Arabs to know that Israel will tell the hypocrites around the rest of the world (much of which has also had plenty of Jewish blood on its hands) that it doesn't care what they think and act to protect its own people--as any other nation would--as best as it can.
It's time for Israel to not worry about being too precise in its targeting...for it's time that Arabs fully understand that if they harbor and support terrorists as heroes, they'll share in their fate. President George W. Bush said almost those exact words regarding America's own fight not long ago. When dealing with their own "problems"--a la Assad's "Hama Solution" in Syria (in which ten times more people were killed in a month than Israel killed in two years of intifada), King Hussein's Black September in Jordan, Saddam's murder of Kurds in Iraq (5,000in Halabja alone), the slaughter of millions of Black Africans in the Sudan, etc., Arabs have murdered literally millions by poison gas, bombs, and artillery from afar...and without a peep out of the United Nations either.
It's time for Israel to make it clear that it will use its own air force, tanks, and such--the way America has--to target the rats' dens instead of risking the lives of its own nineteen year old infantrymen by futilely trying to do the job as "morally correct" as possible. This has gained it nothing among the world's hypocrites and cost it the lives of more of its own soldiers instead. Israel is fighting a war it didn't want. It repeatedly offered more than fair compromises to its enemies...far more than Arabs ever offered to any of their own national competitors. But nothing short of its own suicide will satisfy most Arabs. Arabs don't worry about "ethical choices" when disemboweling Jews. On the contrary, the more innocent the victim, the more preferred he is for shock value as a target. It's time for Arabs to get massive doses of at least a version of their own medicine.
While I don't advocate blowing up Arab buses, restaurants, schools, and such, any building, town, etc. harboring murderers and their collaborators must be recognized for what the Geneva Conventions recognize it as: a fair military target.
Listen to Article #51/7:
"The presence of the civilian population shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attack..."
Article #58b:
"The parties to the conflict shall...avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas." The rats' dens are typically set up in or adjacent to civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc., as America has learned for itself in Iraq.
Article #51/2:
"The civilian population...shall not be the object of attack. Acts of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited...Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Arabs typically target Israeli civilians.
And those famous funeral processions showing hundreds of the dead butcher's colleagues firing weapons into the air? It's time that Israel sees that for what it is: one big, legitimate military target. It's time for Israel to stop letting Arabs dictate how the game will be played. If mothers and infants are fair game for Arabs, then what are the murderers' collaborators?
It's time for Israel to send the press packing, tell the UN to drop dead, build the security fence as quickly and as strongly as possible with an adequate buffer (permitted by U.N.#242) so it doesn't have its absurd suicidal 9-mile wide existence again, and ask its friends in the United States to stop having one set of standards for themselves and another one for Jews in their sole, microscopic state. When we thought we knew where Saddam was dining, we bombed the restaurant to smithereens...innocent diners present and all. And the more unpredictable the Israeli response to Arab barbarity, the better.
I wish it had not come to this. But when volumes of Arabs start dying relatively randomly (Arabs outnumber Jews 50 to one...they know this...so do the math), as Jews are doing, perhaps they'll be less likely to treat their own terrorists as heroes. And yes, this may also not be the solution, but Israel has tried everything except consenting to its own demise, and nothing else worked either. Arabs simply replaced a pre-'67 "one fell swoop" strategy for Israel's destruction with a "destruction in stages" strategy instead.
It's time for Israel to lose it predictability and for Arabs to get a megataste of what they've been dishing out.
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