Appeasement By Another Name

The "must-read" piece today for anyone who cares about the survival of Israel and the defeat of Islamist whackjobbery is Caroline Click's column in the Jerusalem Post. (h/t Andy McCarthy).

It's also vital reading for anyone still naive enough to believe media reporting on the so-called "Mideast Conflict," more accurately known as "Israel's War For Survival." As Click writes:

The most interesting aspect of these [false, anti-Israel] media reports is that for the most part, the news agencies reporting Hamas's wild allegations don't even have correspondents in Gaza. Hamas's habit of kidnapping Western -even pro-Hamas - reporters caused most Western media outlets to remove their correspondents from Gaza more than a year ago. The Israeli media have not had correspondents on the ground since Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005.

Yet the same media outlets that realized Hamas is too radical to be trusted to respect their own reporters' lives refuse to question the veracity of Hamas's stories and are more than willing to credit these stories as fact well past the point of professional embarrassment. Indeed, no media outlet - either Israeli or foreign - has ever asked whether it even makes sense to run Hamas's propaganda in the first place. They have certainly not bothered to inform their audiences that the source of their stories is a genocidal terror group that is currently waging a missile campaign against Israeli civilians whose goal is to terrorize and kill them just because they are Jewish.

Click also writes about politics determined to "do business with" (a.k.a. "appease") Hamas. This group, unfortunately includes more than Jimmy Carter and the American Left. It also includes President Bush and Secretary of State Rice.

I've been to Israel and walked along the security fence. I've waved at a Hezbollah fighter along the Lebanon/Israel border. (One finger only, of course). It's a beautiful country and I hope to go back and take my children, too.

But what really stood out for me is how normal Israel appeared, even as it suffered levels of terrorism and murder that would never be tolerated for 60 minutes in the US, much less 60 years. Can you imagine what, for example, Quebec would look like today if its government fired a daily salvo of missiles into New Hampshire and Vermont for even a week? The smoldering ruins of Montreal wouldn't be habitable. Americans would demand it.

Israel has suffered daily missile attacks for a year, and still shows restraint, still refuses to blow Gaza to smithereens. Missiles and mortars pour from Iran, through Egypt and land on the streets of Israel, but Israelis limit themselves to targeted, military strikes...and then are condemned for it by the world.

Can you imagine? Concord, NH and Burlington VT and getting hit by MISSILES... and the US government did nothing more than target a few military leaders? It's an impossible scenario.

After 60 years of fighting for their own lives against baby-killing, anti-Semitic, genocidal lunatics, Israel is still considered illegitimate by much of the world, and in particular by a large percentage of the American Left. What sort of anti-Semitism does it take to watch a Tel Aviv pizza parlor destroyed by a suicidal terrorist with a backpack full of explosives, nails and rat poison--and side with the killer?

Next time you run into a MoveOn.org liberal--ask him.