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| Home Front: Politix |
| A Proportionate Response is Madness |
| 2006-07-25 |
| The list of those who have accused Israel of not being in harmony with its enemies is long and, alas, distinguished. It includes, of course, the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan. It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, it seems, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom. The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to re-establish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights. These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only state in the Middle East that is a democracy. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel's enemies want that, they can have it in a moment. Is this really the same Richard Cohen? |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #7 Suggestion but rather they should quit using mine. Without the URL linking to the domain I registered and own they are a fake. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2006-07-25 22:24 |
| #6 Maybe you should mod your name: The Sock Puppet of Doom |
| Posted by: Champ Angeger5024 2006-07-25 22:11 |
| #5 The fake one Nemble. I have better things to do besides follow the jerk around. The Proportionate Response is total war in the U.S. Grant mold. The Jew haters and TRANZIs in EUrope and the US know this full well. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2006-07-25 22:08 |
| #4 OK, which SPoD is it? |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-07-25 18:43 |
| #3 Yes that is, Nimble. |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2006-07-25 18:38 |
| #2 Actually if the Isreali response to Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaeda were "proportionate" to what these groups were trying to do, the IDF would have turned South Lebanon into a vast sheet of radioactive glass. Why can't these "journalists" who are actually "propogandists" realize that all of these Jihadist groups want the complete and utter obliteration of all things western and modern......and most of all all things Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu...etc., It is in all reality the confrontation between the forces that brought mankind into civilization and the forces that want us to live in the 7th century in dung heaps. Let's just say that if these "diplomats" really stopped and thought about it........the last thing they really want is a Proportional response out of Isreal. I think that most career diplomats in the UN view non-stop negotiation as job security...whether it solves anything or not......."Hey Let's exchange letters on the problem and meet in Davos for a conference" |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2006-07-25 15:16 |
| #1 But the world is full of dislocated peoples and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that -- oh, what irony! -- the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. A crock of BS. Thank you Google. http://www.civilwarhome.com/nativeamericans.htm Statistics show that just under 3,600 Native Americans served in the Union Army during the war. Perhaps the best known of their number was Colonel Ely Parker, who served as an aide to General U. S. Grant, and was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. Statistics for the Confederacy are not reliably available, but most scholars of Native American involvement in the actual fighting of the war are very well acquainted with the major Southern figure among them: Brigadier General Chief Stand Watie, a three-quarter blood Cherokee who was born in December 1806 near what would become Rome, Georgia. Stand Watie was one of the signers of a treaty that agreed to the removal of the Cherokee from their home in Georgia to what was then the Oklahoma territory; this split the tribes into two factions, and Stand Watie became the leader of the minority party. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the minority party gave its allegiance to the Confederacy, while the majority party went for the North. Watie organized a company, then a regiment known as the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles; the regiment fought at Wilson's Creek, Elkhorn, and in numerous smaller fights and skirmishes along the border with what was known as Indian Territory. The warriors found curious the white man's strategy of standing still and allowing people to shoot at them, or lob artillery shells at them; the Cherokee tended to be spectacular at wildly brave mounted charges, but once the artillery began to fire, the warriors wanted nothing to do with it. Stand Watie was unreconstructed to the end; it is believed he never surrendered until June 23, 1865, well after other Confederate commanders had given up. He died in 1871 and is buried in the Old Ridge Cemetery in Delaware County, Oklahoma. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2006-07-25 10:19 |