ISRAEL AGAINST the WORLD

This is for those of you out there that believe Israel is the big, bad bully of the Mid-East. It is an article by Peter Worthington, reprinted here in its entirety. I know this is sort of cheating, but it's CHRISTMAS, not the holiday season as some left wingers want to call it, and I've been too busy CHRISTMAS shopping to spend a lot of time here. Forgive me. I'll be back on the 26^th.

The Toronto Sun - Nov. 26, 2006 - Peter Worthington

As an added CHRISTMAS present, I submit to you a letter to the editor that appeared in the Toronto Sun. The editor's reply is in the brackets.

From the start I appreciated the interesting report on the Guantanamo detention centre ("Inside Gitmo," Peter Worthington, Nov. 12). I was surprised that the readers' responses you chose to print last week were negative, siding with the terrorists. Worthington is a fine, knowledgeable journalist who knows of what he is writing, and his word can be taken at face value. The conditions at Gitmo truly are appalling, hair-raising, terrible and also humiliating -- not for the inmates, but for all of us.

Barbara Sherriff

(Worthington is known for telling it like it is)

Merry CHRISTMAS, Ho ho ho.

Want to know why we (meaning the West) won't win the war on terror? Look at Israel, arguably the toughest, least compromising of the democracies when it comes to combating terrorism. It has been fighting terrorism from the day it became a sovereign state, thanks to the UN.

Yet Israel, after failing to win the brief war with Hezbollah, is back to having to defend itself against rockets from Gaza, where Hamas rules when it isn't feuding with the Palestinian Authority. The other day, after a rocket attack, Israel announced it was attacking the home of a suspected terrorist leader where explosives were stored. It gave the occupants 30 minutes warning to evacuate before war planes obliterated the house. So what did the residents do? Well, not only did they not evacuate, but neighbours formed a human shield at the targeted house and, guess what? The Israel war planes were called off. So now, every time the Israelis give the 30-minute warning which, apparently, is policy, the "human shields" of women and children head for the targeted house, secure in the knowledge that the Israelis won't attack.

This is madness -- no way to fight a war, or terrorists. And this is Israel -- the toughest democracy on the block. And yet Israel hasn't even gotten its kidnapped soldiers back from Hamas and Hezbollah, which provoked Israeli retaliation. American, British, Canadian and NATO soldiers are even more restrained. When the Americans had (or thought they had) insurgents in Iraq, mostly confined in Fallujah, a hotbed of enemy activity, rather than obliterate it (as they would have done in WWII) they gave a week's warning for civilians to depart before they attacked. When the assault eventually went in, the bad guys were mostly gone -- dispersed to other areas to continue their slaughter of the innocent. War cannot easily be waged peacefully. Restraints often mean prolonging the war and increasing its casualties.

Today, humane considerations are paramount. The symbol of peaceful protest is Mahatma Gandhi, the creator of passive resistance that anti-military activists like to cite as a way to thwart authority. Often overlooked, is that Gandhi's formula worked against the British. If he and his followers had lain down in front of Cossacks, the Wehrmacht or the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, Gandhi would have become an asterisk of history rather than an icon.

A report out of Britain recalls that when American forces first went into Afghanistan, the first Taliban they caught were terrified --apparently convinced by their indoctrination that the American monsters would rip their livers out. Consequently, captives babbled like brooks and told all they knew. Then they discovered that American soldiers feed you and generally abide by certain rules and ethics unknown to Taliban and al-Qaida. Thereafter they shut up with no repercussions. Remember the U.S. bombing of Baghdad prior to the 2003 invasion? Peace activists from the West pompously announced they'd be human shields around prospective targets. Once the bombing started, these people fled -- outraged that the Americans could be so inhumane, even though none were targeted. As for Israel, if its government is nuts enough to give warnings of attacks, then it deserves what happens. The next warning should be that if human shields remain, they will quickly become ex-human shields.

One attack should be sufficient to persuade Palestinian human shields to take cover. It's idiotic to give warning of an attack. Hezbollah and Hamas don't warn intended targets of rocket attacks and suicide bombings. America lost the Vietnam War because it refused to do what was necessary to win -- a political decision that cost unnecessary lives on both sides, and achieved nothing. Is that the future of Iraq? It seems so.