Re: Massacre In Gaza - Black Saturday

On Jan 4, 4:21 pm, Fred J. McCall <fjmcc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You can't 'negotiate' with the sort of vermin who think that randomly
killing women and children is 'freedom fighting'.  You can only kill
them.

Oh, that's true enough.

But as I noted, there are other things going on too.

Some years back, terrorists in the Gaza strip used an ambulance to
facilitate an act of terror. So, now, ambulances are stopped at
checkpoints there like any other vehicle.

But do you really think that any parent in Gaza who loses a child
because an ambulance didn't arrive on time is going to blame anyone
but the Israelis - who directly delayed that particular ambulance?

In the beginning, things were clear enough. The people of Palestine
might have had a complaint that the Turks and the British didn't leave
them an independent state... but that didn't excuse the kind of
violence that was directed against the Jews who came there, or who
were there before.

Because this has been a long-running conflict, there are certainly
many people now among the Palestinians who have suffered *personally*,
but who personally aren't responsible for such things as the decision
of Israel's neighbors to try pushing it into the sea in 1948.

People who are caused to suffer will strike back. They will strike
back at an external enemy, not against the fellow members of their
community. They will strike back in ways within their means that will
work - so if they're heavily outclassed in conventional arms, they
will turn to guerilla warfare, which all too easily degenerates into
terrorism.

So the tragedy is that at least *some* of the support for terrorists
coming from Arabs is due to the cause "they're only human", rather
than the cause "they're perverse monsters".

If they were just perverse monsters, killing the lot of them would be
no problem. Since they aren't - and a lot of them do have the sense to
realize terrorism is wrong and counterproductive - the fact that
terrorism has to be stopped, and stopping it is going to affect a lot
of innocent people's lives adversely, is to be regretted. I can admit
that while at the same time reminding people that, unfortunately,
nobody seems to have come up with a *practical* way in which it can be
*avoided*.

After September 11, 2001, people in America, at least, have awakened
to realize that it is not reasonable to expect Israel to be a punching
bag. This is good.

But it's still bad that a lot of ordinary people in Gaza were affected
by the blockade - or are being hurt now in the fighting.

But just as the Palestinians don't have a big army to meet the Israeli
Defense Forces on the battlefield... Israel, too, does not have
unlimited resources. If Europe doesn't like what's happening in Gaza,
with its much larger pool of manpower, it could no doubt have supplied
the forces with which to occupy Gaza and both prevent rocket attacks
on Israel and do so in a way that is less uncomfortable for the people
of Gaza.

But Europe is so abjectly dependent on Arab oil (and now Russian
natural gas) that it doesn't really have the freedom to conduct its
foreign policy without fear or favor based on its own moral
convictions - the way the U.S. does. Which is why I'm *very* thankful
we have the U.S. around, and do not think that Europe's differences in
foreign policy from the U.S. are necessarily the result of superior
wisdom on the part of Europe.

John Savard
.

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