Garbanzo Toons

The Wages of Restraint

As Susan Fields points out, Jews have tried restraint in the past. The results for the Jews have always been hideous.

Now the Jews of Israel, doing what they have to do to survive, are accused of "acting out of proportion" to the daily assault of Iranian rockets fired by Hezbollah to kill Jews in their homes. The Jews should show restraint. Restraint was what the Jews in Germany showed when the Nazis were organizing the Holocaust and the world wouldn't believe that what was happening was happening. Restraint is what the rest of the world showed when they dismissed a crazy Austrian paperhanger and his nutty book, "Mein Kampf." If the rest of the world was willing to ignore Hitler and his boasting and bloviating, why couldn't the Jews?


Restraint is what you show in disputes with rational people who are willing to compromise, who will give up something in return for something. But restraint can buy time for your uncompromising enemies to enable them to plot the ambush to kill you later. During the Holocaust, certain Jewish leaders, eager to show restraint by trusting their enemies, gave up lists of Jews, a few at a time, to save others a little while longer.


Ariel Sharon, showing restraint, organized the withdrawal from Gaza as a way to achieve peace through strength, a controversial idea but nevertheless credible. You could call it aggressive restraint. All that was wrong with it was that it didn't work and was perceived as weakness by the enemies of Israel. The only thing Israel got was more rockets on its cities, the elevation of Hamas to power and the kidnapping of its soldiers standing duty in Israeli territory.

Restraint, it turns out, is a lot like appeasement. It only strengthens the belligerent party. But when it comes to the Jews, this fact is ignored or argued. When it comes to the Jews, they can do nothing right.

So in a clear case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", you might as well battle on as if the lives of you and your family depend on it. Because when you're Jewish, and the alleged moral authorities of the world (UN, EU, most of the media, "human rights" organizations) have abdicated their positions in favor of excusing terror and murder against you, and condemning you for defending yourself, you have no choice but to fight.

For more on appeasement, read this column by Diana West.

As The New York Times reported from Dearborn, "For miles along West Warren — in hair salons, restaurants and meat markets — shopkeepers and their relatively few customers stared at televisions tuned in to Al Jazeera." Incidentally, there were "relatively few" customers out and about only because, as one baker knew, "most of his regular customers were home watching (Al Jazeera), just as they had all day, every day," since Israel's offensive began.


Why does this matter? Al Jazeera, of course, is the relentlessly anti-American, anti-Israel, jihad-boosting "news" network. To find sets in the heartland tuned in to this station today is roughly akin to coming across an American town, circa 1942, tuned in to Axis Power propagandists Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw.


But this isn't, as they say, your father's heartland. Hezbollah itself is popular in Dearborn, which can fill a banquet hall to celebrate "Lebanon Liberation Day" — the day Hezbollah claims as its 2000 victory over withdrawing Israeli forces. Osama Siblani, the publisher of Dearborn's Arab American News, considers Hezbollah, along with Hamas and other jihadist groups, to be "freedom fighters." And, as Siblani tells it to the Detroit News, he's not alone: "If morally supporting Hezbollah or associating with (Hezbollah spiritual leader Muhammad Hussein) Fadlallah is a crime, 'there is not (sic) going to be enough buses to haul the people out and take them to jail.'"


Siblani was speaking before the Israeli offensive began. But not before the 1983 Hezbollah bombings in Beirut that killed 241 US servicemen, 63 U.S. Embassy personnel and 58 French paratroopers. And not before the 1984 Hezbollah torture-murder of CIA station chief in Lebanon William Buckley. And not before the 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the torture-murder of Navy diver Robert Stethem. And not before the 1988 Hezbollah torture-murder of Col. William Higgins. And not before the Hezbollah bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, killing 29, the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 96, or the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 U.S. servicemen.


American sympathy for Hezbollah profanes American dead.

Make sure you read both of these pieces in their entirety.

Labels: Hezbollah, Osama Siblani, Susan Fields

posted by Harry @ 10:53 AM