Always the Jew

The news out of Israel this morning is very bad.the world expects SO much
out of Israel to conduct its war as if in a surgical suite, not a
battlefield. Lebanon has become Hezb'Allah's killing field, hiding behind
women and children in civilian areas to shoot their increasingly
sophisticated and deadly rockets then blaming the Israelis for shooting
back. How cynical! How horrible!

This is just madness: Orwellian even, where all that is right and good is
wrong and bad and where the victims have to justify for the world their own
existence. Israel, alas, doesn't play the victim very well any more. Even
when fighting for its existence. To let Hezb'Allah control Lebanon and the
Northern Border is to play with fire. They must be destroyed or severely
"degraded" in DOD-speak. Orwellian in that fighting back with the ferocity
that is needed to clean out Lebanon of Arabs who mean to destroy it, Israel
seems to lose the moral authority that was "conferred" upon it by world
opinion in the beginning. Where, pray tell, was the world for the last 6
years while Israel did nothing to stop Hezbollah? Where is the world EVER
where atrocities occur? Nowhere indeed. Then the Lebanese government screams
at the Israelis to get out on the American Sunday morning news programs,
followed by soft-spoken plain truth by Shimon Peres, an 83 year old veteran
of all of Israeli history who rightly says: what kind of government is it in
Lebanon that has no control over its own land as is the case with the
present government which cannot order Hezb'Allah out of its own territory?
It's no government.

I am hoping that Israel will not be deterred by the Chamberlains of this
generation who would appease the 21st Century's madmen like the ones that
control Iran and Hezb'Allah. Ultimately, Israel is going to have to do the
rest of the world's dirty work, for in the end I can answer Mr. Peres'
questions of' Why are they shooting at us? What reason do they have?: They
hate Israel because it is Jews that run it. They hate Israel because it sits
in the middle of what might be a caliphate that stretches from Spain to
Iraq. Let there be no doubt that what is going on here is a war that is
being fought by Hezb'Allah on purely ideological grounds: the ideology of
baseless hatred, of ignorance and fear. On the basis of a reading of Islam
that is stretched and distorted beyond the recognition of right-thinking
people. It is being decided in the streets of Beirut and Cairo where
thousands, maybe millions, who have been deprived of a decent life by their
own governments which have chosen instead to blame all their worldly woes on
the Jews instead. Always the Jew. Because we are always there. And always
will be. For this fight is, from the Israeli/Jewish perspective, also about
life. We choose life. We choose to defend life. And if that choice is what
gets Israel in trouble with world opinion, then so be it. If history teaches
us one thing it is that the world, with the exception of a few, does not
care if we live or die. That is an unacceptable choice.