|
|
|
|
9/13/03 What Remedy for Terror? Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has resigned his post, leaving the Road Map in tatters, and the dubious future of the Palestinian Authority in the clutches of Yasser Arafat, the Al Aqsa brigades, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. This is the frustrating side of Terror. It nearly always wins, at least while the good guys wear the kid gloves. The advantage of the terrorists is that they have no inhibitions. They eschew all law and all morality but their own twisted self-righteousness. We fight them with blinders on and one hand tied behind our backs. While terrorists kill children, babies, mothers, grandparents, and great-grandparents, Israeli tanks and gunships target terrorist leaders and suffer savage attacks in the press for any innocents who happen to be caught in the crossfire, and for endangering the peace process by refusing to watch their babies burn and turn the other cheek. Why don't we hear the moderate Palestinian voices? First, because there aren't many of them. The moral of every tale at a Palestinian story time is the same: The only good Jew is a dead Jew. Every map in their schools shows a unified nation of Palestine that covers the whole of Israel, and then some, all of it supposedly stolen from them. But mainly, the moderate voices are quiet because they are choked off in the dead of night, their families tortured or killed. The terrorists are gangsters par excellence, enforcing loyalty at the point of a gun. The moderate voices have far more to gain by keeping quiet than by speaking out. Stay quiet, stay alive. Speak up, and die. Terrorists pretend to act on behalf of their societies, but really their motive is to protect and advance their own power. They would not kill their own people with relish if they really cared. They only protect the "good" people, which means the ones who knuckle under and give them whatever they ask. The rest are worse trash than the Jews. The modern, liberal, snooty European politically correct rules of engagement are the life's blood of terrorism, because those rules prevent the enemies of terrorists from doing anything that would give the "moderates" any reason to risk rocking the boat. The rules boil down to this: if there is any risk of harming the innocent "beneficiaries" of terrorism, you cannot take action. How are you supposed to fight an enemy, then, whose strategy is to make sure that you can't distinguish him from the innocent, that he can't be isolated from the innocent, that to attack him you have to attack the innocent? You can't. It's like playing a football game in the fog against a team composed mostly of small children. You are not allowed to injure a child, but one of the opposing players wields a knife. You can't advance for fear of running over a child in the fog, and if you wait it's only a matter of time before that knife slips between your ribs. Those rules are impractical, and thus immoral, because they empower evil to triumph over good. That is why the rules of war are so simply stated: Turnabout is fair play. All's fair in love and war. A world in which the good side always plays by the rules and the bad side always cheats is a world without hope, a world in which human life is impossible. No rule that makes human life impossible is a rule worth following. The difference between us and them is that we harm the "innocent" reluctantly, and with remorse, while they do it with relish, and evident pride. You are wondering why I put "innocent" in quotation marks. Because in a war like this one (ours against terrorism in general, Israel's against the Palestinian instance), there are no noncombatants on the terrorist side. By definition, a terrorist who cloaks himself as a noncombatant makes it practically impossible for the enemy to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. That is why it is a war crime under the Geneva Convention to engage in any kind of combat without wearing a uniform (every terrorist, every guerilla who hides among the civilian population, is a war criminal). That is also why the Geneva Convention does not (contrary to popular misconception) prohibit attacks on noncombatants. It only prohibits unnecessary attacks on noncombatants. Thus the uniformed soldiers who kill noncombatants in the honest attempt to kill war criminals are not war criminals, themselves. To win the war with the least bloodshed, it must become more profitable for the moderate elements of the terrorist side to depose the terrorists and replace them with a legitimate, limited governmental authority than it is to stand by or support the terrorist regime. There are several ways to do this:
If there are moderate elements, the only way to empower them is to force them to the conclusion that their terrorist "benefactors" are leading them only to destruction. If there are no moderate elements, then the only way to win is to win outright, by one or more of the outlined means. Until we accept these truths, we will not win a war on terror, and neither will our staunches Middle Eastern ally, Israel. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
|
|
All Original Content (C) 2003, 2004, 2005 SoothSeeker.Com
SoothSeeker Welcomes your Comments at letters@soothseeker.com Report problems to webmaster@soothseeker.com
Hits on this site:
|