Robert Novak, the Late Terrorist Lover

Diana West seems to be among the few Conservatives willing to openly speak ill of the recently deceased Robert Novak. That's a shame because his support for Hamas and his claim that they are "freedom fighters" shows quite clearly where his sympathies lay and what the relevant evaluation should be. Perhaps with the passage of time some of us forget what Hamas actually stands for. Let's remind ourselves a bit. From a helpful link in early 2004 (there have been more atrocities since that time):

Since the beginning of the current wave of Palestinian violence, in September 2000, Hamas has perpetrated 425 terrorist attacks of various kinds, in which 377 Israelis were murdered and 2,076 civilians and soldiers were wounded.

Since the beginning of the current wave of Palestinian violence, in September 2000, Hamas has perpetrated 52 suicide attacks, in which 288 Israelis were murdered and 1,646 were wounded.

Among the more infamous Hamas suicide bombings and terrorist attacks were (the following is a representative, not exhaustive, list):

# The 1 June 2001 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv discotheque, in which 21 people were murdered and 120 were wounded;
# The 9 August 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem restaurant, in which 15 people were murdered and 130 were wounded;
# The 1 December 2001 double suicide bombing on the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 188 were wounded;
# The 2 December 2001 suicide bombing of a #16 bus in Haifa, in which 15 people were murdered and 40 were wounded;
# The 9 March 2002 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem cafe, in which 11 people were murdered and 54 were wounded;
# The 27 March 2002 suicide bombing of a Netanya hotel on the first night of Passover, in which 30 people were murdered and 140 were wounded;
# The 18 June 2002 suicide bombing of a #32A bus in Jerusalem, in which 19 people were murdered and 74 were wounded;
# The 4 August 2002 suicide bombing of #361 bus at Meron junction, in which nine people were murdered and 50 were wounded;
# The 21 November 2002 suicide bombing of a #20 bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 50 were wounded;
# The 5 March 2003 suicide bombing of a #37 bus in Haifa, in which 17 people were murdered and 53 were wounded;
# The 17 May 2003 suicide bombing in Hebron, in which two people were murdered;
# The 18 May 2003 suicide bombing of a #6 bus in Jerusalem, in which seven people were murdered and 20 wounded;
# The 11 June 2003 suicide bombing of #14A bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and over 100 were wounded;
# The 19 August 2003 suicide bombing of a #2 bus in Jerusalem, in which 23 people were murdered and over 130 were wounded;
# The 9 September 2003 suicide bombing of a hitchhiking post near the IDF base at Tzrifin, in which nine soldiers were murdered and 10 were wounded;
# The 9 September 2003 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem cafe, in which seven people were murdered and 70 were wounded;
# The 29 January 2004 suicide bombing of a #19 bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 44 were wounded;
# The 14 March 2004 double suicide bombing at Ashdod port, in which 10 people were murdered and 16 were wounded.
# On Aug 31, 2004 16 people were killed and 100 wounded in two suicide bombings within minutes of each other on two Beersheba city buses, on route nos. 6 and 12.

[emphasis added, note the most of the attacks were on buses, malls, cafes, and other civilian targets]

Anyone who thinks that the instigators and perpetrators of these vile acts are freedom fighters has left the realm of rational discussion, condemned himself as morally evil, and would ideally be subject to social ostracism by all individuals with a shred of decency.

The truth about Hamas and what to do about it

As usual, Caroline Glick puts it best:

The simple truths that the media, Jimmy Carter, the Bush administration, and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government are all unwilling to acknowledge are that Hamas is a genocidal terror group sworn to Israel's destruction and that it represents the will of the majority of Palestinians who elected it to office in 2006 and who continue to support it today.

This plain reality demonstrates that there is only one responsible policy for Israel to follow and for the international community to support if they are truly interested in peace between Israel and the Palestinians. That policy is for Israel to lay waste to Hamas's terror army in Gaza and overthrow its regime. Only when they are forced to pay a real price for their support for terror and jihad - as opposed to being rewarded for it with further Israeli land giveaways - will the Palestinians be forced to reconsider that support. Only when they realize that terror will get them nowhere - as opposed to anywhere they wish - will the Palestinians be forced to accept Israel as an unchanging reality with which they must live in peace.

Why Ahmadinejad is smiling...

As usual, Caroline Glick has some of the best analysis of what to make of recent events in the Middle East. Here are a few exerpts:

And the fact is that the Sunni states are aligned with most of Iran's policies. They keep Iraq at arm's length and loudly criticize US operations in the country. They continue to back Hamas and ostracize Israel. And they have taken no substantive stands against Hizbullah's subversion of the Saniora government since the end of the Second Lebanon War.

The main reason that the Sunni Arab countries cannot contend with Iran is that their publics share Iran's jihadist ideology. And their publics share Iran's general jihadist ideology because the Sunni states have indoctrinated their publics to believe in jihad through their state-controlled media.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and their Sunni Arab brothers are in no position to argue with Iran publicly or to confront Iran's Arab proxies because they can't explain to their own people why Iran's bid to destroy Israel and to dominate the world in the name of Islam is a bad thing.

However, to get the full context of how we got to this point, I recommend Scott Powell's Islamist Entanglement lectures which are available both as a set and as individual lectures. Sign up now!

Israel, Gaza, and all that...

I haven't written about Gaza for some time. However, an interesting recent column was brought to my attention via Daniel Pipes's blog. In the column a liberal Israeli commentator, Yossi Klein Halevi, admits that he and others who supported the "disengagement" were wrong on the Gaza withdrawal. He writes:

...Israelis still felt so desperate to end the occupation that they withdrew their army and uprooted their settlements from Gaza in 2006. Had Gazans begun at this point to create a peaceful state from their new, self-governing territory, the Israeli public almost certainly would have endorsed substantive negotiations over a West Bank withdrawal. Instead, they elected a government led by Hamas, whose theology calls for the destruction of Israel and war against Jews around the world, and whose terror attacks are small pre-enactments of its genocidal ambitions. Palestinian rocket attacks that had previously been aimed at settlements were simply redirected toward towns and villages within Israel.a

Halevi thinks that "even guilty Israelis realize that, until our neighbors care more about building their state than undermining ours, the misery of Gaza will persist." I wonder, it seems to me there are still plenty of "guilty" Israelis, as he puts it, that are perfectly willing to put the "plight" of the "Palestinians" above their own interests. But it's certainly difficult to tell given the chaotic political situation in Israel.

He also thinks that "[w]ithin the coming weeks, the Israeli army may re-invade the Gaza Strip in an attempt to stop the rocket attacks on Israeli towns and, perhaps, topple its Islamist Hamas government." I certainly hope so -- such an action would be overdue.

Israel's Self Destruction

Louis Rene Beres has written an accurate, depressing assessement of what has been going on in Israel over the last few years. Here's an excerpt:

Israel, this pitiable human being in macrocosm, is now in a final process of becoming this "thing." Called upon repeatedly by our "civilized" world to negotiate with unrepentant terrorists, every prime minister from Yitzhak Rabin to Ariel Sharon has agreed to assorted policies of national defeat. Current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's idea for Middle East peace is simply more of the same. Fortified by an incontestable history of prime ministerial failure, his ironic plan is to arm Fatah against Hamas and to proceed with a new round of existential territorial concessions. Inevitably, of course, Israel will continue to disappear in shameless increments of auto-desecration now named "realignment."

Please read the whole article -- it is well worth it.

Let's get the shorter items out of the way. I heard only a little from the Minnesotans Against Terrorism. They seem to be a good group speaking out against the blatant media white-washing and inconsistency on terror.

This has been one of my frustrations with the news for some time. In the case of Israel, the media refuses to characterize anything violent that the Palestinians do as terror and instead always identifies the perpetrators as militants. Interestingly, the media and some intellectuals also do the reverse to some extent, occasionally characterizing some attacks on military targets as terrorism. This is undesirable and unneccessary. The words terrorism, terror, and terrorist should properly only be used when the civilian population is deliberately targeted in an attempt to terrorize it. When such is clearly the case, as with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the like, to use an inappropriate term adds to the injury done to the victims.

I might also mention the morally unjustifiable habit that the media has of adding the death of the terrorist bombers to the total victim count. Proper coverage of such an event should always separate the deaths of the victims from the terrorists.