The Palestinian tragedy in context

Image via WikipediaWe live in sad times when the effectiveness and measure of political objectives is measured in human lives. Human deaths are just numbers that are tallied and bandied about in justification for more violence, more retaliations of mindless and random killing. More justification for terrorism, more reason to feel grief and anger. It becomes a vicious circle with no end in sight, just periodic outbreaks of peace which inevitably end in more violence and more deaths.

Is there any other means of subduing an enemy besides killing innocent civilians?
We need the wisdom of Solomon to be able to mediate between Israel and it's enemies.

Although I am biased in my opinions, it serves no purpose to attempt to find justification in the actions of one side against the other. What is necessary must be done. Decisions are made by those in power. No doubt those decisions are difficult and the cost is always measured in human lives.

Those who envision a peaceful solution must be incredibly optimistic. Maybe they are also naive because anyone who understands the Muslim mind has no doubt that the deep hatred for Israel consumes all possibility of any peaceful solution in the near or distant future.



An excerpt from an editorial in the Australian newspaper today.

There is no doubting the rage of millions of Muslims over the condition of the Palestinians. It is equally assured that anti-Semitism runs deep in much of the Muslim world, just as it was endemic in Europe 70 years ago. But the real reason for Islamic terrorism has less to do with Israel than the fact that around the world small groups of men, and they are almost invariably men, feel powerless in cultures where women have the same rights they do, where people can say and wear what they like and where democracy, not theocracy, is the universally supported form of government. For all their invocations of the Koran, Islamists who believe in mass murder have no real connection with the honoured Muslim faith as practised by billions of people on all continents. The Muslim people of democracies such as Indonesia and Turkey have no truck with terror and are accordingly a target for Islamic extremists. Certainly, religious conservatives won the last election in Iran, but only because a council of clerics decides who is allowed to run for office. And the people of Afghanistan, in the October 2004 presidential poll, and Iraq, in the 2005 general election, demonstrated they preferred democracy to dictatorships.

Islamist terrorists see these many millions of Muslims as enemies, just as they hate the Americans and Europeans, the Africans and Australians, the people of every and no faith who they murder whenever they are able. And they will use any explanation they can come up with to excuse the gratification they take in ideologically driven killing. Osama bin Laden used to explain that US bases in Saudi Arabia were an affront to his faith, but he did not call off al-Qa'ida when the US pulled out of the kingdom. And, short of every Jew leaving the country, there is nothing Israel, or any other nation can do to placate the Hamas ideologues and their allies. Last week, the Taliban banned girls attending school in a frontier province of Pakistan. To show people they meant it, a few days later a suicide bomber murdered 13 schoolchildren just across the Afghan border. It is the same sort of strategy that Hamas suicide bombers have used to kill people in Israel, Jews and Muslims alike. Such savage nihilism serves no rational purpose in the world of practical politics. But the men who design doctrine for Hamas and the Taliban, and the many terror cells who follow their lead, are not much interested in the world the rest of us live in.