Friday, August 04, 2006

Olmert Speaks the Truth

I came across this at Power Line :

Times: [T]here is a sense in the world, and you must be aware of it, of lack of "proportionality". Many people question how after two soldiers kidnapped and eight killed by Hezbollah we are now seeing upwards of 400 dead and rising in Lebanon. How can such an initial incident justify such a huge response from Israel?

Olmert: I think that you are missing a major part. The war started not only by killing eight Israeli soldiers and abducting two but by shooting Katyusha and other rockets on the northern cities of Israel on that same morning. Indiscriminately.

Now we know that for years Hezbollah - assisted by Iran - built an infrastructure of a very significant volume in the south part of Lebanon to be used against Israeli people. The most obvious, simple, way to describe it to the average British person is: can you imagine seven million British citizens sitting for 22 days in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham in Newcastle, in Brighton and in other cities? Twenty two days in shelters because a terrorist organisation was shooting rockets and missiles on their heads? What would have been the British reaction to that? Do you know of a country that would have responded to such a brutal attack on its citizens softer than Israel did? Based on my knowledge of history no country in Europe would have responded in such a restrained manner as Israel did.

I don’t want now to draw comparisons [but] one could ask the question what precisely did the European forces [do] in Kosovo 10 years ago. How many innocent civilians were killed in Kosovo 10 years ago? We can draw on and on these comparisons.

What are we talking about? More than a million Israelis are sitting 22 days in shelters because of the fear of terrorists. In every single case...that we kill an uninvolved civilian in Lebanon, we consider it as a failure for Israel. And you know how many Israelis raise their voices as a result of this? And they don’t have to because we feel that we failed when we killed uninvolved people.

The difference between us and Hezbollah is that when we kill innocent people we consider it a failure, when they kill innocent people they consider it a success.

Tell me, who are they aiming at when they shoot already 2800 rockets on Haifa, Hanariya, Akko, Sefat, Afula and the rest of the places, if not to kill innocent people? So I’m sorry for every individual that was killed that was not involved.

And by the way, how do you really know that 400 innocent civilians were killed? How do you know who is innocent and who is not? Why? This is not an army. They don’t wear uniforms that distinguish them from other civilians. We didn’t attack any of the Christian quarters of Beirut. We didn’t attack any of the Christian residential areas in any part of Lebanon. We attacked only those areas where they had the Katyusha launchers, where they had the missile launchers, where they had the command positions of Hezbollah, where they had the storage houses, the logistic centres and so on and so forth.

So the fact that people were killed there who were not dressed in uniforms doesn’t mean that they were innocent civilians. There were Hezbollah people, they are the terrorists. Did you ever see terrorists dressed with military uniforms like we have in our army? No.


It is a shame that this man has tp point out such an obvious truth.

Yesterday on Fox I saw a story on Hillary Clinton chewing out Rumsfeld for the supposed civil war in Iraq. And I had to wonder why are these people so obtuse, we are fighting for a noble cause and we face real peril if we lose and all they cand do is think about the next election. It is all about Hillary.

Someone said that Sadr wants to create another Hezbellah in Iraq. Some say we should have let the mayor of Najaf carry through on his threat to kill Sadr, or killed him ourselves. Well if we are going to talk about what we should have done, we probably should have forced him to stay in Iran with his crazy friends. I think we focus too much on election cycles and whether or not we can accomplish a goal by the next election. Of course history does not work like that. Imagine the kind of peace FDR would have been forced to accept if he had been worrying about losing an election. No, I think we need to realize that the goals are long term and the battle will be long as well. That does not mean that security can not be improved in Baghdad in the short term, it should be. That seems to be where all the action is at these days...but we have to realize that just doing away with one man like Sadr will not stop this fanaticism. We need to defeat them in their own world. They need to understand what their future will be if they go down this road with the likes of the mullahs.

6 comments:

MeaninglessHotAir said...

They have been going down the road with the mullahs for 30 years. They know what they get: bigger territories, more Islamic fundamentalist states, an ever-more cowardly Western news media, more and more turmoil and backbiting in the West. Train them? They're trained already, but in the other direction.

Anonymous said...

MHA:

...an ever-more cowardly Western news media, more and more turmoil and backbiting in the West.

True. And this has its obvious downside, as we have said here many times. But on the other hand, the turmoil and backbiting are the byproducts of attempts at coming to grips with something that Western society really doesn't want to deal with. It will take a tac nuke over a Western capital, biowar, or something similar to cleave the West into two groups: those who are culturally prepared to stand guard against Jihad for generations if need be and those who will quietly succumb. The West will survive. It just might not survive whole. Such is this new war. Losing a part of the West may be the price we have to pay to win.

Anonymous said...

Assuming jihad continues, the part of the West we lose may be a geographical area, places like Sweden perhaps, or it may be the regnant liberal philosophy - our universities may split apart or change into something new, for example - or some combination of both. But it is clear by now that some areas and social groups will stay out of the fight. And the rest will be transformed into something new. We just don't quite know what the new world will be like. But if jihad continues, we will know soon enough.

Unknown said...

MHA:

They also get the shit kicked out of them on a regular basis. Do you really think that most of the people of the region want to be sent into a mine field with a plastic key to Paradise in their back pockets? Do you think they want their cities to end up like Beirut and Fallujah and Baghdad?

You are becoming so negative I get the feeling you think we might as well just give up. Or that we have already.

gumshoe said...

to respond
to terrye's comments to MHA -

the range of responses to apocalyptic visions is likely to swing from resignation and despair,to swooning in false hope.

had you asked me several years ago,
i would have scoffed,
but my sense is G-d lives at a very deep level in us all.

He does not take the rantings
of an Ahmedinejad or Naslrallah lightly.

we have seen their kind before.
vividly.

has Israel threatened to
"wipe Iran from the map"?

no,of course not.

mature human beings don't
trifle with the miracle of Life.

for those who have no (surface) sense of feeling for such a thing
(a supreme being overseeing,
and understanding, the depravity of some of portions of mankind)
look in your own heart
and see if you don't comprehend such a thing.

it's not complicated.

Unknown said...

gumshoe:

I agree, God does not take it lightly. I also think there is more to these things than we see at the time. For instance, where were all the other Shia during Sadr's parade? Maybe they are beginning to think that this is not what God wants.